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 2000 Olympics: Return to archery pays off with Olympic berth
Sunday, July 30, 2000 By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer
In the beginning, archery was simple for Denise Parker.
Her father, a hunter, got her interested in archery when she was 10. Parker got really good, really fast. Her first two years in the sport, she won just about everything. First the local recreation league, three years later the Pan Am Games.
And then, at age 14, she won a bronze medal in the team archery competition at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul.
"I look back, and I realize I didn't have a clue," Parker said. "I think now if a 13- or 14-year-old came up and beat me in a competition, I'd go, 'What are you doing?' At the time, it felt natural to me."
Parker returned to the Olympics in 1992, finishing fifth in the individual competition a year after winning the junior world championship. Then she hit a bit of a slump, finishing ninth at the 1996 Olympic trials, and she began to drift away from the sport. By 1998, she thought she was finished with archery forever.
Said Parker, "I never felt in control."
She devoted more time to her job as a marketing manager at Hoyt USA, and she was perfectly happy. She expected never to return to the sport again.
But now she's 26 years old and back on the Olympic team, having finished third in last year's Olympic trials.
When she decided to return to the sport, Parker hadn't picked up her bow in a year and a half. When she went into the garage to get it, she discovered that in her short time away technology had advanced. She wondered whether she should put money into a new bow.
"Do I really want to do this?" she asked herself. The answer came quickly: "Well, yeah."
Before she knew it she was back on the national scene in 1999 3/4 and shooting better than ever.
"I didn't know what it was like to lose," she said. "That's part of what makes me better today 3/4 I went through that and it doesn't bother me anymore. If I lose, that doesn't scare me. I've been there, I've done that, I got over it. Before, I don't think I knew that."
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