Why ‘Day One’ Was A Blessing For Para Archery World Championships Hopeful 

For six weeks after his spinal cord injury, Jolly Duong couldn’t feel his own heartbeat. 

For an endurance athlete who had spent years attuned to every beat, breath and signal his body offered, it was more than a physical consequence of his injury. 

“It made me feel like I was dead inside,” he says. 

Before March 16, 2024, Duong measured his days in kilometres rather than hours. 

A competitive triathlete, he was drawn to the physical challenge, but also the contest between body and mind – the search for one more stroke, one more stride, one more effort when fatigue insisted he had reached his limit. 

Then, in an instant, that conversation with his body fell silent. 

A mechanical failure on a descent through Kangaroo Valley sent him crashing headfirst into a rock, shattering his T5 vertebrae and leaving him with a spinal cord injury. 

Yet what lingers most from those early days is not the accident itself, but the way his memory has preserved it. 

“When I think back to those first nine days in intensive care,” Duong says, “I still remember them in black and white.” 

Those first three weeks, he says, were the hardest: a blur of two near death experiences, the beginning of what would become a 10-month hospital stay, and the dawning understanding that the life he had known was over. 

“I’d gone from running, cycling and swimming twice a day to being completely bedridden,” he says. “The loss of independence was such a rude awakening of how quickly life can change.” 

But somewhere amid the grief of losing one life, another began. 

“You can be thinking about a hundred different things. But for those 30 seconds when you lift the bow, everything goes quiet.” Jolly Duong 

On a particularly difficult night in hospital, a nurse named Lindsay found Duong sitting in bed, journalling. 

“Your life isn’t over,” she told him. 

“I said, ‘The life I knew is over,'” Duong recalls. 

“She said, ‘Yes, but it doesn’t have to end here.'” 

The next day became Day One. 

“I decided to treat the hospital as Day Zero,” he says. 

That decision didn’t change his circumstances; it changed where he directed his energy moving forward. 

While still undergoing rehabilitation, Duong began searching for movement again. He completed the City2Surf in a wheelchair only months after his accident, before exploring wheelchair racing, swimming and athletics. Eventually, that search led him to the sport that would capture his imagination most. 

Ask Duong what he loves most about the sport and he laughs. 

“I’d actually say I hate it,” he says, “It’s a love-hate relationship.” 

The contradiction makes perfect sense. 

Where endurance sport rewarded relentless movement, archery demands stillness – every arrow requires patience, intention and extraordinary precision, with the slightest movement capable of sending a shot astray. 

“You can be thinking about a hundred different things,” he says. “But for those 30 seconds when you lift the bow, everything goes quiet.” 

For Duong, there is something unexpectedly liberating about that silence. 

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Duong’s emergence in the sport coincides with a landmark moment for Para archery in Australia. 

Next year, Australia will host the World Archery Para Championships for the first time, bringing the world’s best Para archers to Brisbane just six years before the Paralympic Games arrive on Australian soil. 

Less than two years after first picking up a bow, Duong has set his sights on earning selection for a home World Championships that once would have seemed unimaginable. 

“Without a doubt, I’ll be there one way or another,” he says with a laugh. 

“It gives us a chance to test ourselves against the world in our own backyard. For me, it would be another opportunity to see how far this journey can go.” 

Archery Australia National Head Coach for Para Archery, Ricci Cheah, believes that goal is well within reach. 

“He’s still relatively new to the sport, but he’s come leaps and bounds,” Cheah says. “At the rate he’s improving, I think he’ll get there.” 

Cheah says Duong possesses qualities rarely found in the sport. 

“He’s a big risk taker. He kind of dives in headfirst into anything he does. That actually suits archery at the elite level because it’s hard to find people willing to take risks. Archery tends to attract more risk assessors.” 

Just as importantly, he embraces the repetition that excellence demands. 

“He loves to grind,” Cheah says. “Archery is a constant grind every day. You have to be consistent. You have to show up to every training session no matter how you feel.” 

Nearly two and a half years after deciding tomorrow would become Day One, Duong continues to pursue the same thing that first drew him to endurance sport: discovering what might lie beyond the next challenge. 

“You get to experience your firsts again,” he says. 

“At first I was resentful, now I see it as a blessing. You get to figure things out all over again.”