Meet the Canadians who competed at the World Nomad Games

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Astana, Kazakhstan — Audrey Ann Meloche began her first day competing in horseback archery at the World Nomad Games in Astana, Kazakhstan, feeling a little off. Normally, she runs her yoga retreat on Quebec’s Magdalene Islands (Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine), leading visitors through cold-water plunges in the Atlantic Ocean, interspersed with yoga and spa. Now she was representing her country in Central Asia’s version of the Olympics.

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Two days before the opening ceremonies of the World Nomad Games, the team had attended a lottery where the numbered horses were designated for each rider. Some horses were better than others. The Kazakh riders had their own horses, a huge advantage for the skilled, nomad-style equestrians. The Canadians kept their fingers crossed and smiled, as they would throughout the competition.

Meloche got her first ride on her stallion — they’re all unfixed male horses in these games — as dark approached. She begged the judge for a second practice ride. It was allowed and she shrugged off the challenge of being placed in the final group.

The next morning, as she and her Canadian horseback archery team rode the city bus to the Kazanat Hippodrome, the venue for her sport and others, disaster struck. She had woken up with chills and a fever of 38.5C, and now the bus was going in circles around a roundabout.

“I threw up all over the front of the bus, everywhere,” she says with a laugh. She would end up in a Kazakhstani hospital, diagnosed with a virus and given organic honey and chunks of beeswax to chew on, and told to sleep.

A few hours later, she was back at the track, and suddenly being in the second-last group was a blessing because she didn’t miss her first chance to compete. The three other members of her team decided to forgo the Games’ opening ceremonies that evening to support her run. One for all and all for one.

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These are the fifth edition of the World Nomad Games, held in September because that is the traditional nomad holiday time, marking the end of the migration and the switch from summer to winter camping. Nomads used to celebrate this with rituals, games and competitions. These modern nomad games ran from Sept. 8 to Sept. 13, beginning on the closing day of the 2024 Paralympic Games and a few weeks after the Olympic Games, a world away in Paris.

For Central Asia, these Games are more important than the Olympics. The Olympic movement was meant to be about building a more peaceful world through sport but has become a global business empire complete with divisive policies and politics. The decade-old WNG bans no country and specifically promotes nomad culture, inviting the world to celebrate it with them. As a way of life, nomadism hearkens to a past that began to end with large-scale agriculture. These Games promote regional ties and the people who share this heritage. Of course, they also hope to attract spectators and tourists to explore their lands.

In Astana, athletes competed in such sports as: kokpar (a little like polo with mounted riders trying to throw a serke or dummy goat into the opposite team’s goal, called a circle. It was once played with a headless goat carcass); kok buru, a similar game with fewer players; horse racing, both long and short distance; horseback wrestling; mas-wrestling (more on this later); horseback archery; traditional archery; koresh wrestling, a form of standup wrestling; alysh belt wrestling; Powerful Nomad Strongman competition; and kusbegilik, competitive hunting with birds of prey, either a golden eagle, hawk or a falcon. Other non-sporting activities included traditional intellectual games, cultural displays and a scientific conference on nomad culture.

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The first, second and third World Nomad Games were held in Cholpon-Ata, a resort town in Kyrgyzstan. In 2014, 583 athletes from 19 countries competed in 10 sports. In 2016, there were 1,200 athletes from 62 countries competing in 26 sports. Then, in 2018, it grew to 2,000 athletes from 82 countries, and 37 sports.

The pandemic delayed the next biannual Nomad Games. But in 2022, the 4th World Nomad Games were in Iznik, Turkey, with 3,000 athletes from 82 countries, but only 13 sports.

Many athletes at the Astana Games said they felt the Turkish Games were poorly organized. Some teams returned home without competing because their accommodations were subpar, and organizers didn’t seem to care.

Such was not the case in Astana this year.

Despite disastrous seasonal flooding in March that killed eight people and forced 96,472 people, including 31,640 children, to be rescued and evacuated, Kazakhstan went all-in for the Games.

Kazakhstan wanted their Games to be a shining example of sports diplomacy, promoting integration and people-to-people relations among nations with common backgrounds while showcasing the country in a positive light internationally. They also wanted to show to the world that their Soviet days are long gone, and Kazakhstan has its own cultural identity.

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So, everywhere in the Games, messages about nomadic tribes abound. Nomads have been living in the region that is now Kazakhstan since the first century BC but the area has been inhabited at least as far back as the Stone Age.

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Like Canada, Kazakhstan is bilingual. Kazakh is the official state language, but Russian is also widely used. The country is rich in natural resources, massive in size but with few people, and is situated next door to powerful neighbours, Russia and China. Kazakhstan is the sixth largest country in the world with a population of only 19 million people, half of Canada’s population. It is the world’s leading producer of uranium and has vast oil reserves, estimated at 4.4 billion tonnes. The American oil companies are here, as are Canadian miners such as Arras Minerals. There are rich, untapped reserves of zinc, chrome, manganese, gold and more. The country is Central Asia’s economic powerhouse, its GDP larger than all the other “stan” countries combined.

Ties between Canada and the Central Asian country are growing. In Kazakhstan, there are Canadian international schools, and the University of Calgary announced in 2022 they planned to open a campus in the country. At a news conference at the Nomad Games, Kairat Sadvakassov, vice-chairman of Kazakh Tourism, boasted that Kazakhstan is basing its growing national park system on Canada’s.

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That aside, what irks Kazakhs is that much of the world still knows them for Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Borat depicts them as antisemitic post-Soviet rubes who consider women chattel. It’s worth noting that scenes of Borat’s faux Kazakhstan hometown were actually filmed in the Romanian Roma village of Glod. Cohen said he chose to make Borat Kazakh precisely because most of the world knew so little about the country.

Kazakhstan responded to the offence by banning the film, threatening to sue Cohen and buying four-page ads in American newspapers full of positive advertorial about the country. Despite their hurt feelings, Borat increased tourism to the country.

In 2020, when the sequel Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was released, Kazakhstan’s tourism department took a different tack. They launched a social media campaign utilizing the movie’s jokes to their benefit, with tourists enjoying the scenery, culture and foods and reacting with the phrase, “Kazakhstan very nice!”

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The Canadian horseback archery team at the World Nomad Games had four members. At 37, Meloche is the youngest and was only introduced to the sport five years ago. She doesn’t even have a horse at her Magdalene Island home, so practices when she winters in Whistler, B.C.

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Robert Borsos, 58, is a massage therapist and both the team’s coach and a competitor. He’s the person who introduced the sport to Canada, bringing it from his native Hungary to Whistler, B.C., where he now lives. This year, Borsos will compete three times in the United States and in six international competitions. He estimates he spends between $10,000 to $20,000 a year on travel for this exotic hobby.

He doesn’t globetrot with a saddle but brings his own stirrups because they’re easier for him to adjust for length. And he’s taught the team a very Canadian solution for protecting the fingers on their right hands from the friction when gripping and releasing a bowstring: wrapping them in hockey tape.

“It’s so much fun!” he says, while noting that he’s riding a horse no-hands that he met only two days ago. “But No. 1, we have to be safe.”

Borsos, who is ranked as an official judge as well as an athlete, claims horseback archery dates to Attila the Hun, whose nomadic horde invented the game. That’s about 700 years before Genghis Khan. The modern version was reimagined by Hungarian Kassai Lajos in the late 1980s. Students of Lajos have taken the sport home to their own countries, adapting it to their preferences and creating the four national styles: Hungarian, Korean, Turkish and Kazakh (jamby atu).

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The idea is quite simple: mounted riders have a limited time to ride 100 metres in a three-metre-wide lane while shooting arrows at three targets as they pass by. Points are awarded for proximity to a bull’s-eye, and they earn one point for every second faster than the allotted time. For every second over that time, they lose one point. Standings are derived from the participants’ total of accuracy plus speed.

That first day of competition was in the Hungarian style, the most difficult and least popular, with the fastest reload and unlimited arrows allowed. All other styles allow only three arrows. Riders must shoot forward, sideways and backwards at the bull’s-eyes mounted on three side faces of a cube. On the judge’s signal, riders canter the horse into the shooting lane and hope the horse stays straight, goes fast but not too fast. Most of the runs last between 10 to 15 seconds, with at least three arrows shot. Competitors have no time to sight arrows and use what they call “intuitive archery.” They pull the bow across their chest while sucking in a breath, quickly releasing that breath and the arrow when intuition tells them to shoot.

Most riders have a quiver on their back that they repeatedly and furiously grab from, while the Canadians kept their spares in their left hands or tucked into their belts.

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“Some horses are not good and injured,” Borsos said on practice day, adding that a good horse wins the competition. “So we get a new horse. Some people are really lucky. They got the perfect horse. But it is what it is.”

On the first day of competition, organizers provided no water or food for the athletes, so the Canadians went without until they got back to their hotel that evening. The next day, bottles of water appeared. And the Canadians began pillaging their hotel’s free breakfast buffet to make takeout sandwiches for the day, something they’d do for the entire competition.

Borsos, along with his teammate and fellow Hungarian-Canadian Zoltan Csontos, were put into the first group of riders for the duration of the competition. Csontos, 57, is a contractor who lives in Cranbrook, B.C. and is building his own home using a form of insulated concrete. He was an archer long before discovering horseback archery in 2003. Csontos, like all the Canadians on this first day, hit his targets a few times but not enough to get onto the podium. Of the 78 athletes from 27 countries, France would take both the gold and the bronze that day, with a Mongolian rider taking silver. Borsos would lead the pack for the Canadians in 63rd place, followed by his teammates Csontos, Nelson and Meloche.

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Csontos joked on his first day that his butt was still hurting from the 30 hours of air travel from Canada to Kazakhstan. But that was fixed by a spa found by a pleasant Kazakh Meloche met on the inbound flight and who agreed to be their guide in exchange for sleeping on their floor.

Though no person or horse would be injured during this year’s horseback archery tilt, the sport can be dangerous. The fourth member of the team, Alvin Nelson, 67, fainted in competition a few years ago and bruised the entire right side of his body falling off the horse. But Nelson is tough. In his late teens and early 20s, he was a pro bronc rider, competing in rodeos across North America.

Nelson hosted the first Canadian Horseback Archery Cup in 2006 on his farm in Mount Currie, B.C., on the Lil’wat reservation. “White people say Coast Salish,” Nelson adds.

Nelson’s parents were residential school survivors, and though they grew up speaking their language, they weren’t able to pass it on. Nelson only speaks a few words, but since his daughter is studying it, he’s started to pick up more, which he finds surprisingly easy.

Nelson drives a snowplow in the winter and works on a road crew in the summer. A few years ago, a car did not stop for his stop sign and hit him, forcing him to undergo many painful surgeries. On bad days, he still walks with a limp.

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Teams from across the world are in this competition, strong ones from the neighbouring “stans,” as well as from Thailand, Pakistan, France (who are quite good and well-funded), Syria and Zimbabwe, among others.

While the Canadian team showed true team spirit, the two Americans in the event did not. Sergey Lozovich hails from Alaska and claims Russian-Indigenous heritage. He chose only to show up for his own events, leaving his teammate to fend for herself. Without her teammate’s support, Di Fernando Gemma dismounted after her run only to have her horse bolt in the back staging area. Luckily, Borsos was nearby and quickly contained her horse.

Gemma said that one of her “baby daddies” is American Indian, though she is not. Regardless, she chooses to ride with feathers in her hair and wears a faux Indigenous costume. All the riders from outside of the “stans” engaged in a little dress-up, most in nomadic costumes. The Kazakhs, Uzbeks and Kyrgs all have state uniforms, as their countries promote the sport as part of their heritage.

Gemma began her runs with a faux war cry of “woo-woo-woo-woo.” Spectators in the stands would echo her call. Nelson, the oldest horseback archer in the competition, shrugged off the appropriation of his culture with a laugh.

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He says the woo-woo call was more for dancing and celebration. “It’s not like we’d do that when hunting or trying to kill somebody,” Nelson says. “Hollywood made it into that.”

Kazakhstan a long way from its Soviet past

Up until the beginning of the 18th century, tribal Kazakhs ruled their own khanate. Around the 1730s, tsarist Russia began colonizing and seizing territory until the khanate became part of the Russian empire. Forced immigration saw Russians becoming 10 per cent of the population, a figure that would swell to 50 per cent from the 1930s to 1952, when Stalin’s Soviet government forced the deportation of at least six million people to Kazakhstan. Like they did in all of the USSR, the Soviets actively tried to suppress local customs, rituals and language in pursuit of proletariat homogeneity.

Kazakhs proudly consider hospitality a national trait. They fed and clothed those Russians dumped unceremoniously on the steppe.

Kazakhstan was the last of the Soviet Republics to declare independence when the USSR fell in 1991. That same year, the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site was officially closed in Kazakhstan, a place where Russian scientists had performed at least 460 underground nuclear tests, according to the non-profit Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).

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With the demise of the USSR, Kazakhstan suddenly became the fourth largest nuclear power on the planet. With American help, 1,410 Soviet nuclear warheads and an undisclosed number of tactical nuclear weapons were returned to Russia for destruction. This was part of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that saw Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus all return Soviet weapons to Russia and become signatories on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).

Today, Kazakhstan is a fledgling democracy. There are opposition parties but the ruling Amanat Party controls government with a commanding majority. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s principle of “different opinions — a unified nation,” is a long way from its Communist past.

The president has announced a national referendum in October that will ask the country whether they think Kazakhstan should build its first nuclear power generating plant. In casual conversations with Kazakhs on the street and at the Nomad Games, no one seemed in favour, worrying that a nuclear power plant could be dirty and dangerous.

Russia now rents the land in the south where the Baikonur Cosmodrome resides, the spaceport that launched both Yuri Gagarin and Chris Hadfield into space.

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Mas-wrestling is ancient

In terms of achieving goals, the Canadian mas-wrestling team exceeded theirs. Mas-wrestling is a sport where athletes sit with the soles of their feet facing each other against a wooden board. They both grip with their hands something like a shortened broomstick handle and try to pull their opponent onto their side or pull the stick out of their opponent’s hands. A version of the game without the separating board — stick pull — is played in the Arctic Winter Games.

The sport rewards both strength and technique. The trick is to keep your balance while pulling the stick and throwing off the balance of your opponent. Matches are a maximum of two minutes in length and athletes “run on the board,” moving quickly to one side to throw off their opponent and pull them or the stick over. The stick cannot be turned more than 90 degrees, and each match is a best-of-three competition.

Mas-wrestling is ancient, says Odd Erling Haugen, vice-president of the International Mas-Wrestling Federation and president of Mas-Wrestling USA.

“I started researching it back in Norway,” says the strongman contemporary of Arnold Schwarzenegger. “It’s in the Norwegian sagas, all the way back to the Vikings.”

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The modern version of this martial art was first promoted by 1972 Olympics wrestling champion Roman Dmitriyev, who hailed from the Sakha Republic, the Indigenous name for the far east Russian province also called Yakutia. Players of the board game Risk may be familiar with it as Yakutsk, which is the capital and largest city in Sakha. In Sakha, thousands pack stadiums to watch mas-wrestling.

The coach and leader of the Canadian mas-wrestling team is Calgary’s Andrew Bolinger, 37, an electrical engineer. Bolinger first participated in strongman competitions, and through travelling to those became introduced to mas-wrestling. Bolinger, a former farm boy, has won many mas-wrestling medals and is the owner of The Strength Edge, a gym that specializes in competitive strength training. (The gym became embroiled in a pandemic controversy because Bolinger refused to follow COVID health orders and shutter the facility.)

Also at these World Nomad Games is Regina’s Ryan Grabarczyk, 25, a rising star in the new world of grip sport (contests that test hand, wrist and forearm strength). Grabarczyk gave it his all, but did not advance to the finals.

His teammate, Courtney Hollihan, 29, five-foot-two and 125 pounds, did. Hollihan began her athletic career in biathlon. She says that sport gave her endurance, strong legs and taught her how to stay in the zone. She was introduced to mas-wrestling two years ago by her boyfriend, Bolinger. This tiny powerhouse is also a power lifter and can bench press 145 pounds, more than her body weight.

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“I’ve been to three other competitions, and they were nowhere near this level of fun,” Hollihan says. “It’s amazing that they’ve treated us so well. They greeted us at the airport, they’re sharing their culture with us and their food, and they have hotels for us and stuff.”

Like the horseback archery team, the mas-wrestlers paid their own airfare to the Nomad Games, around $3,000 a ticket. Bolinger even helped Grabarczyk with the cost of his ticket.

The mas-wrestlers’ matches are staged in one day. Hollihan’s first opponent could have destroyed her spirit.

“She lost her first match against a really good competitor,” Bolinger says. “They were horribly gruelling matches. One of them lasted like a minute, 45 seconds, and the time limit is two minutes. I’ve never seen a match hit two minutes.”

Hollihan, a psychology student interested in practising grief counselling, bounced back undaunted. She would sweep every following bout, earning Canada a bronze, and the first medal of the Games.

“People say I have a really stone-cold face when I compete and I never celebrate after,” Hollihan says. “But this first time I was like, yeah, it’s like I won. I did it. And I felt very emotional, actually. I was choking back tears. I was like, I don’t wanna ruin my makeup.”

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The following day, Calgary’s Mitchell Koop, 26, would represent Canada in the 105-kilo weight class, the heavyweight division of the sport. Koop, who goes by “Mitch,” is an electrician by trade, and a strongman in his genes. His great-uncle was Louis Cyr, a French-Canadian legend who was the strongest man in the world during the Victorian era.

Koop exceeded the team’s hopes, winning his first three matches and earning entry to the gold-medal final. “It was an absolute battle. I’m glad it was … Best opportunity of my life,” Koop gushed after his third consecutive win.

His gold medal match was against a legend of the sport, Kyrgyzstan’s Ataibek Uulu Keldibek. Koop would lose two straight rounds to Keldibek. At the match’s finish, the referee stands between the competitors and lifts the winner’s hand, like in boxing. As Keldibek’s hand was raised, Koop used his free arm to point and bow to the victor in a gesture of respect. Koop thanked the referee and all the judges before exiting the match and moving to the first aid station for treatment.

“For us Canadians, we always display good sportsmanship. We never complain,” says Bolinger. “And if you lose, you have a smile on your face. Everybody’s friends here, that’s kind of how I approach this.”

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Koop’s silver medal on Day 4 of the Games temporarily lifted Canada to 15th place in the medal count out of 97 participating nations.

“Screw the Olympics,” said an exuberant Koop at the medal ceremony. “Come to the Nomad Games. This is where you want to be competing. The atmosphere is unlike anything else. And just the people — it’s incredible.”

Canadian nomad athletes on their own dime

At the Paris Olympics and Paris Paralympics, Canada finished 12th in the medal count.

Seventeen-year-old Canadian swimming phenom Summer McIntosh won gold in the 200-metre medley, 400-metre individual medley and the 200-metre butterfly, becoming the first Canadian to win three gold medals in one Games. And that’s not counting her silver medal in the 400-metre butterfly.

Ethan Katzenberg and Camryn Rogers both won gold in the hammer throw, with Katzenberg’s long hair and moustache making him a celebrity meme. Katzenberg and McIntosh were chosen as co-flag bearers for the Paris Games’ closing ceremonies.

Paris also brought Canada golds in breakdancing, judo, canoe sprint and the men’s 4×100-metre relay. And in the Paralympics, where Canada won 12 gold medals, Canadian Codie Fournie brought home double golds in the men’s 100-metre and 200-metre T5 wheelchair races. Canada also won a bronze in sitting volleyball, a first for this sport.

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Canadian Olympic athletes get cash prizes for winning medals, and some of the winners will get rich endorsement deals. Canada spends $66 million a year in “enhanced excellence funding” to support Olympic athletes.

The Canadian athletes at the World Nomad Games get a grand total of zero dollars from their country, despite the estimated 100,000 tourists who flocked to Astana to watch them compete in person, and the 230 million people who watched the Nomad Games on television. These Canadian nomads dedicate their time, sweat and savings to sports they love, and they do it without their nation’s help.

The only sport in the Nomad Games that appears to have a pro circuit is kusbegilik — hunting with a bird of prey. Kusbegilik competitions involve your bird flying to a partner’s outstretched arm holding bait or initiating an attack on a lure with bait spinning on your partner’s rope. Points are given for completed missions.

The sport is so popular in Kazakhstan that competitors can make a small living in competitions and doing personal appearances with their birds. Traditionally, if you wanted a bird of prey for hunting, you scouted out a nest and waited for chicks to reach adolescence, and then climbed up and stole one while mom and dad were out hunting. Then you spent years training the beast.

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The birds are powerful and impressive. The only other Canadian in these Nomad Games competed in golden eagle hunting. He was also the only Canadian who didn’t have to travel. Alan Hamson is Canada’s former ambassador to Central Asia and was living in Astana during the Games. He’d taken up the sport to experience Kazakh culture, as he explained in a video on his Instagram page. As a diplomat, Hamson is forbidden to do press interviews on anything outside of his official role. So, while he appeared confident in competition, we don’t know if he actually was. Hamson placed seventh out of 18 in the eagle hunting competition. His Kazakh coach, Serikbek Kyntughan, won.

The final day of horseback archery was zhamby or Kazakh style. Three golden drums hung as targets along the track, and the athletes had just 14 seconds to roar past them and take three shots. A harsh wind that day made even the best athletes miss.

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The Canadian men all had admirable showings, but they would win no medals. Still, they had the respect and appreciation of their opponents. If they were in pain, Borsos would massage players from other teams while they were in the saddle. Canadians are always welcomed at international, invitation-only horseback archery competitions.

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One former member of the Canadian team, Aurangzeb Mubashar, started his own team in Hamilton, Ont., before going to Nelson’s farm. Mubashar so fell in love with the sport that he decided to create a team representing his birth country of Pakistan, which he was competing for in the Nomad Games. Mubashar plans to compete for Canada again in future.

Alan Le Gall, coach of the French team and president of the International Horseback Archery Association, also coached equestrian athletes at the Paris Olympics. He says the winning spirit at the Nomad Games is the same as it was in Paris. “Our goal now is to go the Olympics in 2032,” Le Gall says of horseback archery.

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Audrey Ann Meloche had a subtle advantage on that last day of competition. The Magdalene Islands where she practices her archery are almost always windy. Meloche, who says she grew up in Montreal concerned with being pretty in dresses and makeup, says her friends can’t believe she’s now into this sport. Her parents have never even seen her compete.

On the finals day, they should have. Meloche came out of nowhere to leave her mark. She would score 35 points, hitting the swinging targets repeatedly, earning her fourth place overall for women in the competition.

“Everybody was looking at me, saying, ‘What the hell?’” Meloche said of her accuracy.

At the closing of these World Nomad Games, Canada finished 23rd in the medal tally. But unlike in the Olympics, Canada beat Great Britain, Germany, even the United States.

The World Nomad Games return to Kyrgyzstan in 2026. Count on the crazy Canucks to be there.

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