Patrick Huston is a British competitive archer from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He captured three world championship titles under the youth level, and eventually competed as a member of Team GB's archery squad at the 2016 Summer Olympics, losing the second round match to the eventual champion Ku Bon-chan of South Korea. Huston currently trains full-time under senior national coach Richard Priestman for Archery UK, while remaining a loyal founding member of East Belfast Archery Club.
Early life
Born and raised in Belfast to parents Adrian and Felicity Huston, both of whom previously worked as tax inspectors, Huston became involved in archery as an eight-year-old pupil at Cabin Hill Primary School. Under the tutelage of British longbow champion and his teacher Audrey Needham, Huston began to show his potential to the sport by joining and serving as a mainstay of Campbell College's archery club. Upon his entry to the Northern IrelandElite Squad as a fourteen-year-old, Huston trained part-time as an archer, and eventually started competing in both local and regional tournaments regularly. In September 2011, Huston founded his very own East Belfast Archery Club across the Tullycarnet Community Centre. In 2014 he left Campbell College to train full-time at Lillleshall National Sporting Centre.
Career
The 2013 season saw him rising to the prominence on the international archery scene, collecting a set of two gold medals each in the individual and team recurve respectively at the World Youth Championships in Wuxi, China. With his untimely success in archery, Huston was named by the British Olympic Committee as one of the country's prospective sportspeople nominated for the 2013 Olympic Athlete of the Year award. Huston continued to extend his career resume through the 2014 and 2015 season by eclipsing the world 70-metre record at the Archery GB National Series in Exmouth, and by capturing his first individual gold medal under the senior division at the opening stage of the World Archery Cup series in Marrakech, Morocco. Leading up to his Olympic debut in Rio de Janeiro, Huston won a bronze medal in the men's individual recurve at the 2016 European Championships in Nottingham to secure a quota place on Team GB's Olympic archery squad. At the 2016 Summer Olympics, Huston was selected to compete as a lone male archer for the British squad, shooting only in the individual recurve tournament. First, he recorded a total score of 656 points, including 22 targets of a perfect ten, to obtain the thirty-eighth seed from a field of 64 archers in the classification round. Heading to the knockout stageon the third day of the Games, Huston confidently overcame the Dutchman and London 2012 fourth-place finalist Rick van der Ven with a two-set advantage at 6–4 in the opening round, before he lost his subsequent match on three straight sets to the eventual champion Ku Bon-chan of South Korea. September 2017 saw him make history by becoming the first archer to win the Great Britain National Series Recurve title three times in a row. As of October 2017 he is ranked 18 in the World. In May 2019, Huston was selected to compete in the 2019 European Games in Minsk, Belarus joining over 100 other athletes in 10 different sports.
