The Italians entered their confrontation with the US team as the favourites, since their team comprises nothing less than the new Olympic individual champion (Marco Galiazzo), the number one ranked archer in the world and reigning World champion (Michele Frangilli), and a Sydney 2000 team silver medallist (Ilario Di Buo).

However, in their first match this morning – they had a bye to the 1/4 round as they ranked third - the Italians were taken cold by a good US team and they never seemed to get the right timing. "We could have performed better. We knew that the USA team is very strong and perhaps this thought affected us a lot in the match", Galliazo said after his team’s great deception. The final score between USA and Italy was 243-240.

In a high-level match, the young team of Chinese Taipei (Chen Szu-Yuan, 23, Liu Ming-Huang, 19, and Wang Cheng-Pang, 17) overcame a strong Australian team. Five points behind their opponents before the last three arrows, the combative Aussies, led by the newly individual Bronze medallist Tim Cuddihy, managed to shoot a perfect 30 for a total of 247 to put pressure on the archers from Chinese Taipei. But the Asian archers resisted to the end to win the match on the excellent score of 250.

The team from Chinese Taipei is very confident as they prepare to face USA at 3:45 this afternoon: "We have reached a high level and believe that our team is the best in the world", their coach Lin Sheng Hsien said.