South Korea's Ryoo Su Jung set a world record for the women's recurve at last year's Macau Open ©World Archery

The 2019-2020 Indoor Archery World Series is set to begin this weekend with the Macau Open.

A total of 321 archers are due to compete at the 250-level tournament at the Chinese special administrative region’s Venetian Resort.

Of those, 139 will be in championship categories - 51 in men’s recurve, 24 in women’s recurve, 51 in men’s compound and 13 in women’s compound.

Among the archers making the trip are world-number-one-ranked women’s compounder Alexis Ruiz of the United States, men's compound World Cup champion Mike Schloesser of The Netherlands, women's compound World Championships runner-up Paige Pearce of the US and Rio 2016 Olympic silver medal-winning men's recurver Jean-Charles Valladont of France.

Korean pro teams Ulsan Namgu and Busan Metropolitan Corporation will also take part.

It will be the latter’s international debut.

At last year’s edition of the event, Hyundai Department Store’s Ryoo Su Jung of South Korea set a world record for the women’s recurve 18 metres ranking round, with 595 points out of a possible 600.

New Zealand's Riku Van Tonder will be looking to make his mark in Macau ©World Archery
New Zealand's Riku Van Tonder will be looking to make his mark in Macau ©World Archery

The winners at the Macau Open will take an early lead in the Indoor Archery World Series rankings and a step towards the Finals, scheduled to take place in Las Vegas on February 7 and 8.

Qualifiers for that are taken from the season rankings for the four championship categories: men’s recurve, women’s recurve, men’s compound and women’s compound.

Also looking to make his mark will be compounder Riku van Tonder, who made the shoot-down at the 2018-2019 Indoor Archery World Series Finals in Las Vegas in February, posting the first perfect 900 by any archer from New Zealand, and then made his outdoor international debut in May.

He also competed at the Archery World Cup stage in Shanghai and the 2019 World Archery Championships in Dutch city 's-Hertogenbosch, making the third round at both tournaments.

Events on the Indoor Archery World Series are not just for the elite, however.

The competitions are open entry and designed for mass participation.

As part of the Macau Open, competitions are being run for traditional, youth and university archers, with nearly 150 under-17s participating.