by Craig Springer, USFWS
“It started with a coupon,” Darrell Pace told me via a telephone interview from his home in Hamilton, Ohio. “It was a buy an hour, get one-hour free teaser to shoot a bow. I had BB guns and liked to target-shoot, so I thought I would try it out.”
The gold and silver Olympic medalist in Archery even remembers the date and time: “May 2, 1970, at 9:30 A.M.,” he said. That’s when the then 13-year-old stepped into the Cincinnati Junior Olympians archery club with a rented bow and pulled the string for the first time and let the arrows fly.
They have been flying ever since.
Arrows and electronics have been his life-long passions. One passion paid the bills, the other sent him to faraway places, other continents, as a competitor. Pace was employed by the Ohio Division of Wildlife as a radio technician, ensuring game wardens and conservation staff had efficient and reliable communications. He managed base station radios, repeaters, hand-held radios, and units in trucks and cars. Pace retired after 31 years, having been stationed at the Division’s Xenia, Ohio, office.
The teenage Pace took to the bow with ease, bolstered by good coaching. “The best students are those with no experience,” Pace said. “They haven’t learned incorrect form yet.” That was certainly the case for the neophyte archer in 1970. Pace possessed a natural affinity for the bow. He progressed through the ranks with rapidity such that after nine months he reached Olympic-level success at the archery club—a progression that normally takes years to achieve. Pace made the World Team in only three years and in 1975 won his first World Championship.
The next year, Pace’s talent took him to the Olympics in Montreal, where he earned an individual gold medal. He made the Olympic team again in 1980, but the Americans sat out the games held in Moscow, Soviet Union. Four years later, Pace again stood atop the podium in Los Angles, earning another individual Olympic gold medal. At the Olympic games in Seoul in 1988, Pace helped bring home a silver medal for the Archery team event.
Pace stayed at it 30 years, training four to five days a week, after hours at his home and outside his Xenia office at a shooting range funded by Pittman-Robertson dollars, monies derived from excise taxes paid by the manufacturers of archery gear, firearms, and ammunition.
Today, the range is appropriately known as the Darrell O. Pace Archery Range, honoring his achievements. This public shooting range is one of more than 800 such archery and firearms ranges found across the country, similarly funded by manufacturer’s excise tax dollars, and open to all of any skill level.
Pace enjoys bowhunting and coaching. He’s given lessons at his namesake range in Xenia, and at nearby Rush Run Wildlife Management Area and coached hundreds of students at the archery club near his home. Some of his students have gone on to earn championships and one served as an alternate for the U.S. Olympic team.
The archer with an interest in things electronic had a good amount of ribbon and metal draped around his neck through the years. He earned a place on four Olympic teams, four Pan-Am teams, and seven world teams; he’s the only archer to ever hold all the world records at the same time.
“When you’re on top, there’s always someone gunning for you, a competitor trying to match or break you,” said Pace. “There is always someone coming up behind you.” That allowed him to keep an edge.
The World Archery Federation recognized that edge and his lifetime of achievement and named Pace the Athlete of the Century in 2011—an honor he expects to hold another 75 more years.
You and your family and friends can find your way into archery through 4H Shooting Sports, USA Archery, or the National Archery in the Schools Program. And keep a look out for coupons through an archery shop near your home—you just never know.
To learn more, visit Partner with a Payer.
Craig Springer, Office of Conservation Investment