What is in a (round) name? Why one person’s Albion is another’s Long Windsor

Note: This article previously featured the equivalency of Albions and Long Windsors prominently. After a recent AGB decision, Albion is now the preferred name for all categories of archer, so classification tables now reflect that. For now, both round names are still listed in the Rules of Shooting, but the reference has been removed from this page to avoid confusion. All other round aliases described in this page are still in effect and still used in the official classification tables.

The development of the new 2023 handicap and classification system was an opportunity to address a few long-standing inconsistencies in the way we refer to different rounds. Most people are familiar with the odd situation in UK archery where the same round can be shot by two different people and called two different things. The most common of these are probably where adult women and junior men overlap. The Hereford and Bristol 1 rounds are identical – the same number of arrows at the same distances, shot to the same rules. When an adult woman shoots it, or in fact any woman shoots it, it’s called a Hereford. When an U18 Man shoots it, it’s called a Bristol 1. This is also now the case from the other side, where this round is now available to 50+ Men, and would again be called a Bristol 1.

The same issue happens in Metric rounds too. The 70m WA 1440 round, which in the UK we have historically tended to call the “WA 1440 (Ladies)” is the same round as a Metric 1 which is shot by U18 Men. This is where things start to get a bit complicated though. That 70m 1440 round is not just for adult (21-49) women, it is also the correct round for –

• U18 Men
• 50+ Men
• U21 Women

So, if we were using the old style naming, the three 1440 rounds should really be called this-

WA1440 (Men / U21 Men )
WA1440 (Women / U21 Women / U18 Men / 50+ Men) / Metric I
WA1440 (50+ Women / U18 Women ) / Metric II

That’s quite a mouthful, and is not actually a good way of communicating what the round actually is as it relies on you already knowing what format of rounds the different age groups normally shoot.

Cosmetically, they just don’t work either. A first draft of the new classification tables using those long compound names was unwieldly and hard to read, and made the tables so wide they wouldn’t both fit on a single page.

So, in the new handicap and classification tables these rounds are just given a short canonical name based on the starting distance.

WA 1440 (90m)
WA 1440 (70m) / Metric I
WA 1440 (60m) / Metric II

This naming allows us to identify the core, unchanging elements of the round, without tying the name to the particular age-groups and categories that happen to be shooting them right now. That’s useful because that relationship does change every now and then, like it did in the recent age-group revisions. This separation of “what it is” and “who shoots it and how” is useful, because the handicap and classification algorithms only care about the former, and not the latter.

This separation is important because sometimes identical rounds are treated differently for records purposes. For an uncomfortable period in early 2022, World Archery introduced some very unpopular rules about equipment failures, effectively removing the previous allowances and meaning archers weren’t allowed time to fix equipment issues and make up lost arrows. ArcheryGB did not adopt this rule into its Metric format rounds (the Metrics 1-V, and Metric 122s and Metric 80s). This created a very awkward situation at competitions where both types of rounds were being shot, where two people shooting the same underlying round were subject to different rules. At that point, those rounds could not be considered as the same rounds for the purposes of records as the UK rounds were shot to theoretically more favourable rules.

You might reasonably ask “Why don’t we just use the same names as World Archery use?”. Unfortunately, WA don’t actually have proper, distinct names for these rounds. They’re just all called “The 1440 Round” and there’s an assumption there that you know which variant of the round applies to you. Deep in Book 5, Chapter 32 of the WA Rulebook it gives only this definition of the rounds, without giving them any distinct names. (they haven’t yet fully adopted their own name changes for the Cadet, Junior and Master age groups to U18, U21 and 50+)

32.6.Outdoor Rounds

32.6.1.
The 1440 Round consists of 36 arrows from each of the following distances shot in this order:
60, 50, 40, 30m for Cadet Women and Master Women;
70, 60, 50, 30m for Cadet Men, Junior Women, Women and Master Men;
90, 70, 50, 30m for Junior Men and Men.

From https://www.worldarchery.sport/rulebook/article/85#article-1713

Which Alias to Use?

Now that we’ve established that some rounds have different aliases depending on who’s shooting them, we just need to override the canonical name when rendering the table for that category. The list of aliases is shown here.

Canonical Name	Men 50+	Men Senior	Men U21	Men U18	Men U16	Men U15	Men U14	Men U12	Women 50+	Women Senior	Women U21	Women U18	Women U16	Women U15	Women U14	Women U12
Hereford / Bristol I	Bristol I	Bristol I	Bristol I	Bristol I	Bristol I	Bristol I	Bristol I	Bristol I	Hereford	Hereford	Hereford	Hereford	Hereford	Hereford	Hereford	Hereford
WA 1440 (70m) / Metric I	WA 1440 (70m)	WA 1440 (70m)	WA 1440 (70m)	Metric I	Metric I	Metric I	Metric I	Metric I	WA 1440 (70m)	WA 1440 (70m)	WA 1440 (70m)	WA 1440 (70m)	WA 1440 (70m)	WA 1440 (70m)	WA 1440 (70m)	WA 1440 (70m)
WA 1440 (60m) / Metric II	Metric II	Metric II	Metric II	Metric II	Metric II	Metric II	Metric II	Metric II	WA 1440 (60m)	Metric II	Metric II	WA 1440 (60m)	WA 1440 (60m)	WA 1440 (60m)	WA 1440 (60m)	WA 1440 (60m)
Long Metric (Women) / Long Metric I	Long Metric I	Long Metric I	Long Metric I	Long Metric I	Long Metric I	Long Metric I	Long Metric I	Long Metric I	Long Metric (Women)	Long Metric (Women)	Long Metric (Women)	Long Metric (Women)	Long Metric (Women)	Long Metric (Women)	Long Metric (Women)	Long Metric (Women)
Short Metric / Short Metric I	Short Metric	Short Metric	Short Metric						Short Metric	Short Metric	Short Metric

Bowstyle Aliases

There’s one more dimension of aliasing we need to consider too – bowstyles. Different rounds might be shot by people in exactly the same category, but the round will be called a different thing based on the bowstyle. There’s only really one of these at the moment, and it’s the round that invovles shooting 6-dozen arrows at a 122cm ten-zone face at 50m. If you’re shooting a Barebow, then that’s the WA 50m Barebow round. If you’re shooting anything else, it’s a UK Metric 122-50 round.

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You can see the results of all of this aliasing in the official classification tables on the ArcheryGB website, or on this site by using the classification table generator here. The handicap tables just use the canonical names for each round, as the handicaps are the same regardless of who’s shooting the round or what bow they used.