This film is part of Free

Dartchery in Taunton

Dartchery aims for bullseye

Sport 1968 1 mins Silent

From the collection of:

Logo for South West Film and Television Archive

Overview

Dartchery is a combination of darts and archery. It appeared in the Summer Paralympic Games from 1960 and remained on the Paralympic programme for wheelchair athletes up until Arnhem in 1980. Thirty-one mixed pairs from eighteen countries took part at the 1968 Paralympic games in Tel Aviv and teams competed against each other in sixteen rounds and American pair Geissinger and Kelderhouse won the gold.

The origin in the UK was a group of non-disabled darts players playing ordinary darts against wheelchair archers using a bow and arrow shooting at a board exactly three times the normal size of a standard dart board at a distance of thirty feet. Archery-darts or dartchery was demonstrated at the Stoke Mandeville Games in 1953 and added to the competitive programme in 1954. The 1986 Summer Paralympics were the third games to be held under the International Stoke Mandeville Games Federation and hosted at the Israel Sports Centre for the Disabled in Ramat Gan and the first in Paralympic history not to be held concurrently with the Olympic Games.