Lajos Kassai

Lajos Kassai in 2009

Lajos Kassai (born 16 September 1960), bowyer, creator of the Hungarian horse archery sport, owner of the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic. Married, has a daughter.

Bowyering

Lajos Kassai originally qualified as a mechanic. He engaged in bowyering as a sideline in the mid 1980s, then reconstructed the Hungarian composite bow from the conquest era, eventually this became his profession, and he became the first in the world to mass-produce this bow. He makes all kind of traditional bows, including Scythian, Magyar, Hun (asymmetric type), Avar, Mongolian and laminated bows. He produces his masterpieces with the power range from 25# to 110#, also their kids version, with 25# - 40# power. Although grown men tend to use bows with 40# - 50# power, the stronger variants are also popular.

Horse archery

Hungarian horse archery range

Lajos finished the competitive rule system of horse archery in the late 1980s, and started to spread this new sport, first in Hungary, and from the 1990s in the rest of Europe, the United States and Canada. He made himself familiar with Zen-archery in Japan, and travelled to Shao-lin, China to study. He summarized his experiences in his book „Horse archery”, which since its first issue has been translated into German and English. Horse archery centers, based on the Kassai-school, are currently operating in fourteen countries, and organize world cups regularly.

He founded the Kassai-valley, the center of Hungarian horse archery near Kaposmérő.[1] His life and work was dramatized by Géza Kaszás in the film "A lovasíjász" (The horse archer), which premiered in January 2016.[2]

Achievements

Till this day he won every single horse archery competition. Raised four Guinness World records: in 1998, with constant horse riding on relay horses during a 12 hours competition, he rode through the 90 meter long horse archery range 286 times, and fired more than thousand aimed shots. In 2002, on a record run that lasted from 6AM to 6PM, he fired over 3000 shots and collected 7126,05 points under 323 gallops, greatly overthrowing his previous record. He competed horse archery for 24 hours, overthrowing his two previous 12-hour world records on 10 June 2006. From 7AM Saturday till 7AM Sunday he rode 661 gallops, fired 5412 shots and collected 15.596,43 points overall, that's an average 212,35 points on a gallop.

He set his last record with his followers in the Budapest Sportarena, on 5 December 2009. He shot 12 thrown up discs with 30 cm diameter under 17,80 seconds, from the back of a racing horse.

Awards, merits

Sources

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 8/9/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.