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Geena Davis Almost Made It to the 2000 Olympics Team

Rob Griffith, AP

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Geena Davis Almost Made It to the 2000 Olympics Team

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Geena Davis, an actress, took up archery at the age of 41 and qualified for the United States Olympic Trials just before the 2000 Games in Sydney.

“I did it on a whim and became obsessed with it,” says the 60-year-old actress. “I trained and trained and trained like crazy and, 2 1/2 years later, I was a semi-finalist for the Olympic trials. It was the most out-of-body experience I’ve ever had.”

“I take everything too far,” she continued. “I’m at the Olympic trials in my forties for something I just took up!”

Davis confessed that, despite the fact that the entire process had made her nervous, she had enjoyed it. “It was fabulous. I will never forget about it.”

Davis’ fans should not be surprised if she competes in the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. Since 1997, the 60-year-old has been practicing archery.

Over the course of her acting career, Davis has portrayed a variety of daring, physically demanding characters, including baseball catcher, pirate queen, and sleeper super-spy.

So, why isn’t she currently in Rio?

“I’m not competing currently,” she explained. “There’s always 2020 in Tokyo!”

16 years later, the memories linger.

Davis recalls, “I was so nervous because no one watches you shoot archery. It’s not a good spectator sport and there were 50 news crews at the Olympic trials, all standing behind me. Every time I touched the bow, I’d hear cameras clicking. Every shot I took, they panned to the target.”

Davis, now 63, tells People that it all began while she was watching the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and got enthralled by the sport of archery, in which American Justin Huish won two gold medals.

“They had a lot of coverage of archery because America was winning all the gold medals, And I was like Wow!” In this week’s edition, Davis recalls the experience, stating that it appealed to her performative side. “It’s very dramatic and beautiful and just thought casually, ‘I wonder if I’d be good at that?’” she says.

During a discussion on her upcoming program “The Exorcist” at Fox’s Television Critics Association press day on Monday, Davis talked about her Olympic experience.

Davis portrays Angela Rance in “The Exorcist”, which is about a lady who feels a demonic presence is endangering her family’s tranquility. She seeks the assistance of two clergymen with opposing viewpoints in order to resolve the problem.

Father Thomas Ortega is played by Alfonso Herrera, while Father Marcus Keane is played by Ben Daniels.

The plot is based on the famous film “The Exorcist” by William Friedkin. Davis remarked during the Television Critics Association summer press tour, “If it’s the same story, I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to do it,”

Though the 6’0″ actress had no previous athletic experience beyond high leaping and hurdles on her high school track team, finding a sport to thrive at had long been simmering in Davis’ head. Her cinematic career, on the other hand, had indicated that she was drawn to athletic activities.

“I had learned sports for a number of movies: I had to learn how to play baseball, and then I had to learn fencing, and TaeKwonDo, and horseback riding, and ice skating and all kinds of stuff,” she says. “And I never thought of myself as athletic, but I was actually really good at everything.”

“And so I thought ‘I want to take up a sport in the real-life way and not the movie version, because they can fake anything,” she chuckles. “Like my character in A League of Their Own only hit home runs, so I would do a nice swing, but the props guys had a giant slingshot to send the ball over the fence with. So I thought, ‘I want to see if I can really learn something real.’”

Davis became interested in archery around 1997. ““I found a coach and became utterly obsessed,” she recalls. “Yeah, I took it up at 41 and it became my life for a couple of years,” she says. She was soon practicing five hours a day, six days a week, and after only six months of training, she had won a number of local, national, and international tournaments.

 

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