the Journey begins
Meet Jo Boardman: The Blind Archer Aiming for World Championship Gold
When most people picture an archer, they imagine eyes locked on a distant target, sighting down the arrow with razor-sharp focus. Jo Boardman is rewriting that picture entirely.
Jo is a competitively driven archer from Auckland and she happens to be blind. What began as an introduction through Blind Low Vision NZ has grown into something far bigger: a serious campaign to represent New Zealand on the world stage and bring home gold at the World Championships.
How it started
Jo's journey into archery wasn't planned. Like a lot of life-changing things, it arrived sideways. Through her connection with Blind Low Vision NZ, she was given the chance to try the sport a discipline that, for visually impaired archers, relies on a tactile sighting system, careful coaching, and an extraordinary feel for body position, breath, and release.
She picked up a bow. Something clicked. The combination of stillness and precision, the discipline of repeating the same motion until it becomes part of you, the quiet challenge of competing against your own previous best it all spoke to her.
How it's going
These days, archery is no longer a hobby. It's a goal with a clear shape to it: the World Championships. Visually impaired archery isn't yet a Paralympic discipline, which makes the World Championships the pinnacle event for VI archers and Jo isn't aiming to make up the numbers. She's aiming for the top step.
Training as a visually impaired archer means working differently from a sighted one. Equipment is set up around tactile sights. Form has to be near-identical shot after shot. Spatial awareness, trust in the setup, and the ability to fully tune out the noise of the shooting line all become everything. Jo has leaned into all of it.
What's next
Jo is building toward national-level competition with her sights set firmly on World Championship selection. It's a long road there's training, qualifying, equipment, travel, and the sheer hours of practice that elite archery demands but she's already proving that the limits people assume are there often aren't.
This blog will follow her along the way. The good days, the tough ones, the breakthroughs, the gear, the coaches, the competitions. If you've ever wondered what it really takes to chase gold from a starting point most people would call impossible, you're in the right place.
Welcome to Jo's journey. Pull up a chair it's going to be a good one.