TOKYO: South Korea claimed gold in the Olympic archery men’s team event today, extending their reign and winning the country’s third archery gold at the Tokyo Games.

Teenager Kim Je-deok, at his first Olympics, won his second gold medal, helping the South Korean team to beat Taiwan 6-0 in the final.

He took a gold in the mixed-team event on Saturday.

“Before going into the games, I said to myself, let’s not think about medals,” the 17-year-old Je-deok told reporters.

“Once you get greedy about medals, you have a lot of thoughts in your head, and that will make your body tense.”

Arrows from Je-deok, Oh Jin-hyek and Kim Woo-jin hit six perfect 10s in the second set of the final.

Je-deok, who became the youngest South Korean Olympic gold medallist, had already won fame at home for an appearance on a 2016 television talent show as an archery genius.

The South Korean men’s team has now taken gold in the event six times at the Olympics, including in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

In Tokyo, the country has already won three of the archery events, with the women’s team tying for the longest gold streak in Olympic history with nine successive titles.

In the semifinals, Japan lost in a shoot-off to South Korea, with Je-deok’s arrow being closest to the centre, but the host country won bronze after defeating Holland 5-4 in the third-place match.

Earlier, Japan beat the US 5-1 to get to the semifinals, leaving world champion Brady Ellison upset at the lost chance of a medal.

“Walking away here without a medal wasn’t even a reality. 

“Kind of like (gymnast) Simone Biles not making the cut and all-around,” Ellison told reporters after his team’s defeat.

Ellison said South Korea had a well-established professional system that was hard to match.

“There, archery is set up like our Major League Baseball, the NFL. 

“So the only way someone is going to be able to beat Korea is to have a team step up and outwork, and no one’s done that,” he said.