Darrell Pace remembers the day he first tried archery. It set his path to athletic greatness.
He was 13 years old, on May 2, 1970, when he showed his dad a coupon offering a “buy one hour, get another one free” deal to go shooting at the now closed Pearson Archery range in Sharonville. Pace, who lived in Reading at the time, was unusually good at aiming and immediately became hooked. He kept going back for more, joining the Cincinnati Junior Olympics program that operated out of the facility, and progressed very quickly.
Almost five decades and two Olympic gold medals later, the 62-year-old Hamilton resident still is considered one of the best archers of all-time 20 years removed from competition – World Archery even named him the Archer of the 20th Century. He’s retired now but still active in the sport through teaching archery to the next generation of potential Olympic archers.
“Back when I was very young, I shot a lot of BB guns and pellet guns,” Pace said. “We had woods behind us, and my dad was from Kentucky. He taught all his kids, ‘One shot,’ so we learned to shoot very accurately. That was back when I was 9, 10 or 11. I loved shooting, I aimed well and that transferred into archery. I loved watching arrows fly.”
Within about six months of taking up the sport, Pace knew he could be competitive with it at a high level. He was moving through the ranks of the CJO program week after week, and his coaches had never seen anybody progress so quickly, Pace said.
Pace couldn’t get enough practice. He would shoot six or seven times a week and sometimes from sun up to sun down on weekends. He estimates he has shot more than one million arrows in his lifetime.
His work ethic had as much to do with his success as anything, and anyone that knew him could see that.
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Jim Coombe, now the president of CJO, likes to tell a story about how his father predicted Pace would be a world champion.
One day when they were driving up 747 to a farm property in Butler County that his dad and some friends leased to use as a private hunting grounds, they saw Pace shooting at the former GE Park. It was a cold fall morning, and Coombe recognized Pace from seeing him before at the Pearson Archery range.
“My dad would see him almost every time he went up there,” Coombe said.
“We went hunting, got done about eight or nine hours and drove back, and there he is shooting still. My dad said, ‘If that boy doesn’t win the world championship or Olympics, something is wrong. I’ve never seen anyone working that hard.’”
Coombe got a message a year later or so that Pace had won a world championship in Switzerland. The following year after that while on a hunting trip in Kenya, Coombe was checking out Olympic results in a copy of the London Times and saw Pace had won gold in Montreal.
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Pace began competing that December after first shooting an arrow, and in 1972, at the age of 15, he participated in the U.S. Olympic Trials and finished fifth – just 10 points away from qualifying.
Archery had just been re-introduced into the Games for the first time since 1920, and Pace was only two years into the sport.
“I just missed making that team, and it kind of put a spark in me,” Pace said. “I was 15 or 16, and I didn’t realize how big the Olympics was and what an impact it would have. I said from then on, ‘I’m going to make every Games. I made seven world teams, four Olympic teams and four Pan-Am teams.”
Pace won the U.S. national championships in 1973 for the first of four consecutive wins there. The next year, he set a world record with 1,291 points, which he raised to 1,316 in 1975 – the same year he won his first World Archery Championships in Switzerland.
His level of success, being so new to the sport, was unheard of at the time.
By 1976, he had qualified for his first Olympics and destroyed the field to win gold at the Games in Montreal, Canada. Pace, who was 19 at the time, set a world record at 2571, as the individual competition was decided back then using the “Double FITA” format. Two 1440 rounds were shot over four days and the total score determined the medals.
“The biggest thought that goes through your mind is you don’t want something to go wrong,” Pace said. “I was more worried about something going wrong than going right. I knew if I shot my average or near what I was capable of, I didn’t have to worry. That was evident pretty much from the first distance. Once I got the lead, I was never in second.”
Pace also qualified for the 1980 Olympics but the U.S. boycotted the Games that year in Moscow in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He would return to that stage in 1984 in Los Angeles, which ended up being the high point of his career. Pace led from the start and never looked back, finishing 52 points ahead of rival Rick McKinney, who had dramatically snatched the World Archery Championships title from him the year prior on his final arrow.
His final Olympics would come in 1988 when the format was altered with ‘half FITA’ rounds being used for eliminations. Pace finished ninth but helped the United States win a silver medal the first year a team competition was introduced. He continued trying out for the U.S. team until 2000 and retired from competition shortly after that.
“Pretty much when I went to the games, I don’t remember a whole lot other than the competition,” said Pace. Pace, who was in the Air Force from 1976 to 1981 when he married his wife, Beth, and moved to Hamilton. “I didn’t do a lot of socializing. My goal was practice, come back eat sleep and get back out to practice.”
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Pace was known for his great technique and unshakeable confidence, both things that set him apart in competitions.
In the 1970s and 80s, archers shot with aluminum arrows and scores were much lower because the margin of error was so much higher than the carbon arrows that were later introduced. Pace said carbon arrows are half the diameter, so archers don’t have to aim as far off to try to hit the target. That makes it easier for anyone to win a competition.
Pace’s technique and incredible aim helped him post scores much higher than his opponents. His technique developed as he tried to compensate for a lack of size.
“In my first world championships I was about 5-foot-10, 115 pounds, so I was a skinny little guy, but what it allowed me to do was to learn to shoot a bow correctly,” Pace said. “In order to shoot the weights the big guys were shooting, I had to use correct form. By doing so, it allowed me to learn a better technique of shooting.”
As Pace got better and better, his confidence grew. He came to expect he would win but never took for granted that he would qualify for a team. Once he got to a competition, Pace just knew he was better than everyone else.
Coombe said McKinney described it best in his book, “Simple Art of Winning.”
“Rick McKinney beat Darrell at a couple world championships but never could win gold at an Olympics,” the 60-year-old Coombe said. “He said, ‘I went in thinking I could win. Darrell went in knowing he would always win, and that’s why he did.’
“When he was confident, no one could ever beat him. His faith in himself was unrivaled by any athlete I have ever met. It came from hours and hours of practice, and he thought outside of the box. He was doing stuff with equipment people were doing 20 years later. He was a mechanical genius.”
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Pace is a little more humble now. He keeps most of his awards, medals and trophies in storage and only a few are displayed in his house.
Now he pursues interests in other things and focuses attention on the kids he teaches, though Coombe said most of them don’t realize what they are getting. The students appreciate his expertise more the better they get. Pace teaches October through April at Archery World in Fairfield.
“I competed for almost 30 years at that level, and it’s a lot,” Pace said. “I do other things now, and I try to teach other kids what to do and how you get to that level. After you do something 25-30 years, I wouldn’t say it’s a mental breakdown, but you reach a plateau and you just say, ‘Enough is enough.’ And then you just try to teach other people to do the same thing.”