At 24 years old, Rebekah Tipping is a second year PhD student at the University of Birmingham, studying welding characteristics of Nickel-based super alloys. She has been shooting for almost six years now and says: “When I’m shooting well, I feel like nothing can touch me and it makes me happy that I can do something right!”
She is focused, determined, honest, disciplined and enthusiastic, “which are, coincidentally, the characteristics required to study for a PhD!” she jokes.
Her greatest achievement in archery is the gold BUCS individual medal she won in June 2016. This was her 9th BUCS event, and she’d missed out on the medals, more often than not, by one or two spots, until this last time, when she shot well and it paid off. “Never give up!” she advises us.
Speaking of gold, this is Rebekah’s third year shooting for The Archery Shop Team and she has just been upgraded to the Gold Band of sponsorship, due to her amazing results and dedication to the sport of archery. She is such an inspiration for all of us!
Rebekah is highly motivated by the optimistic feeling of shooting a good shot and that the arrow will hit the ten! She believes that if her technique and mental performance are in sync, success will follow. The next goal for Rebekah is to defend the title at BUCS outdoors 2017. (Good luck!)
She is very content with her red and white CXT with Inno Ex Power Limbs, as well as with her Shibuya carbon sight and Carbofast stabilisers she has. However, she would like to try a Hoyt Formula set up some day.
She has many funny experiences in archery, but probably her greatest is when she was shooting with a friend from university and actually came up with a new version for the “One Man Went To Mow” tune, adapted for shooting. This sounded like: “One more end to go, one more end ’til lunch time. We’ll move the bosses, then we’ll go, then we’ll go get ice cream!”
Her sporting hero is not an archery one, as she told us, but a Japanese Olympic figure skater: Midori Ito. “In the 1992 Olympics she fell at the start of her routine on a failed triple axel. She knew while she was finishing her routine that she needed something special to win, so she threw in an extra triple axel at the end of her routine and landed it. She became the first ever skater to land a triple axel in the Olympics and went on to win the silver medal. She even apologised to her country for not bringing home the gold. She is so inspiring, I love that she refused to give up even though it took an amazing act of courage and daring to land that second jump.”
A normal day of outdoor training for Rebekah starts after she leaves the office, at around 4/4:30pm. In the interview, she tells us: “I will shoot around 2 dozen arrows as a warm up, then I’ll work on a part of my technique, or something in my equipment that needs tuning. I usually only shoot at 70m, unless I have a competition that involves other distances, or I need to do a walk back tune. If there is nobody else shooting at the field, and I can’t shoot, I will shoot at a small blank boss I have in my flat. I will use a mirror and video analysis to pick out things in my technique that I need to work on. I’m quite a perfectionist so this is a never ending cycle!”