The Fédération Internationale de Boules is a candidate to become a discipline of the Olympic program in the 2024 Games. This proposal stems also from the consideration that for that edition of the Olympic Games are running both Rome and Paris, and the bowls between Italy and France put together approximately 20 million practitioners.
Besides the number of practitioners is, however, possible to consider the bowls rightly considered a precision sport as are archery, shooting, golf and curling.
- Accuracy and speed – It’s an activity requiring to combine together the technical precision and speed, so that the concentration should be fully oriented to the technical execution.
- Activation – Boules require intermediate levels of activation, so that the execution of the shot takes place in a condition of controlled heart rate and the athlete performs the action in a condition of semi-apnea. As with any sport, stress management is essential to compete at the best.
- Error handling – The way to recover from a mistake is to wait the opponents mistake or wait the next turn. It cannot recover from a mistake with an increase of commitment or doing something different from the usual behavior. It serves, however, to have a strategy to refocus on the technical action and execute the shot.
- Concentration – In the precision sports, there are in the same event peaks of the total focusing just before every action and periods of waiting in which the concentration is directed generally on the event. In fact, in boules, each competition is composed of a series of shots: therefore the athletes are fully concentrated in the few seconds before each shot, as a result, while it’s the turn of the others (opponents or teammate) he/she is in a waiting state with a diffuse attention, till the moment of the new shot.
