Why do so many Olympic archers wear bucket hats?

Hats! They’re great to wear outside, especially when you’re playing sports and wish to shield your eyes from the sun. Hats are uniform in some sports -- like baseball -- and optional/variable in others, like tennis and golf. No sport, though, does hats better than archery, and archery is almost single-handedly responsible for keeping bucket hats -- some of Earth’s finest, floppiest hats -- alive in athletic competition. But why? Why do archers wear bucket hats? I spent the last 44 years researching this, and have some potential answers.

It sounds dumb, but I do think this is a reason. I’ve looked over several national-level archery dress codes, and nowhere have I seen specifications about hats you can and cannot wear. Why not exploit that freedom? Olympic archers have been doing exactly that for over a century. Look at the women’s competitors in 1908:

Look at this fly buddy in 1984:

Look at the hat variety at a 2007 pre-Olympic event:

What a rich tapestry of hats, but you’ll note that most of those are bucket hats. So we need some more specific theories.

Here we have the utilitarian theory, as explained by YouTube’s NUSensei:

Modern target archers use recurve bows -- giant pieces of equipment with long strings pulled taut by outward-curving limbs. As the video demonstrates, drawing the string to aim brings it close to the face, which invites collision with the long, stiff brim of your average baseball cap:

But you still want to keep the sun out of your eyes. Solution? A floppy brim!

Some archers -- including Americans -- do wear normal baseball caps ...

... but I reckon it takes a jaunty brim angle or an especially long pair of arms to make that work. For many people, that brim has to be flippable or flexible to stay out of the way.

This is as plausible an explanation as any.

Utility is definitely a factor, but I think this as much of a reason bucket hats are popular: South Korea, which has dominated the last 30 years of Olympic archery, particularly on the women’s side, LOVES bucket hats. South Koreans have won a world-leading 19 gold medals in archery since joining the sport in 1984, and they’ve won nearly all of them under the cool shade of floppy brims:

On the right here is the most decorated South Korean Olympian, Kim Soo-Nyung. While winning her six medals, she did for the bucket hat what Allen Iverson did for the shooting sleeve:

In 2012, South Korea’s women’s team won both the team and individual (Ki Bo-Bae) gold medals wearing particularly snazzy plaid-brimmed bucket hats:

And the 2016 team has been wearing some nice -- if more subdued -- ones, too:

So, to sum it all up and attempt to answer our original question, I’ll say this: Hats are practical for archery, and the sport’s governing bodies allow for variety and experimentation in the realm of hats. Many archers have settled on bucket hats because they suit the sport’s physical demands, and perhaps because South Korea’s bucket-hatted powerhouse has worn them to great success for over three decades.

Also Tony Yayo.