We were all on the screen when Mete Gazoz shot the arrow that brought our country its first gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. A year later, when he shared the 6th Mustafa V. Koç Sports Award with our Women's National Volleyball Team, we were all on the screen again at the online award ceremony.
Mete Gazoz is an athlete who has captured the hearts of all of us not only with his great sports career but also with his personality. It has been a long time since there has been such a popular athlete in a branch other than football in Turkey. When you get to know Mete closely, it is not hard to understand why.
Mete sees archery as the sport of “truth, honesty and justice”. “The arrow goes straight, the arrow does not lie,” he says. In a competition he participated in at a young age, he objected to his rival's arrow not being counted and made sure that he came first. He himself packs up and goes home. In short, Mete does not even realize it at the time, but he is a spokesperson for Olympic values.
As a child, he quietly gets out of bed at midnight and joins his father Metin Gazoz, a former archer, for arrow training “in the living room of the house”. Then he starts practicing with the bow and arrow his father made for him. In 2013, he made a shot at the Youth Olympics that turned the spotlight on him. At that moment, he made up his mind to become an archer and to experience that happiness over and over again.
His story, like that of many great athletes, is full of difficulties and tides. On top of that, she has a speech impediment. Before the 2016 Rio Olympics, she came to the point of quitting school completely due to performance problems. With the support of her family and her coach, she overcame that ordeal and continued on her way. Then came back-to-back world championships and an Olympic gold medal in Tokyo. Mete is now the co-winner of the Mustafa V. Koç Sports Award together with our Women's National Volleyball Team.
Mete's standing as an athlete means more than the medals she has won. The gesture of celebration that Sermet Çınar, one of her coaches, came up with for her turns into a phenomenon in Mete's hands. It becomes the “victory sign” of archery fans all over Turkey and even the world. Because he is not just an Olympic medalist; he is the face of millions who believe in friendship, respect and excellence, in other words, in Olympic values.
