Estonia’s Parnat admitted she wasn’t completely certain she had done enough after the final arrow of her semifinal.
“I was just doing my thing, so I didn’t know what the score was,” she said. “I didn’t think about it, I just knew I had to shoot as good as possible.”
It also took a few minutes for her coach Siret Luik to understand what her protégée had just achieved.
“And when I finished my shot, I just watched her, and she was a little bit also like ‘what just happened?’”
“And that’s why I was a little bit confused if I made it or not. I didn’t see my last arrow, so I didn’t know where it went.”
The quota place booked for Estonia means Paris 2024 will be Parnat’s third Olympic campaign following the London 2012 Olympic Games and Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
Straka trailed Parnat after one set shooting for first place in the last match of the morning, but the Austrian archer then upped her game, scoring 29 points twice in a row and a final 28, to win gold in four sets.
“It’s an incredible, incredible feeling,” she said. “Normally dreams don’t come true, but this is real now and I’m so happy to represent Austria in Paris 2024 Olympic Games.”
“My strength is to become stronger when I need to be stronger and I’m just so happy that everything came true as I wanted.”
Competition continues at the European qualifier for this summer’s Olympics with the finals of the quota tournament for the recurve men. Archers from Great Britain, Italy, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Ukraine are shooting for three tickets.
