As with the other archery events, the men's individual was a recurve archery event, held under the World Archery-approved 70-meter distance and rules. 64 archers participated. Competition began with a ranking round, in which each archer shot 72 arrows. The scores from the ranking round were used to seed the archers into a single-elimination bracket. The knockout matches used the set system introduced in 2012. Each match consisted of up to 5 sets of 3 arrows per archer. The archer with the best score in each set won the set, earning 2 points. If the score was tied, each archer received 1 point. The first archer to 6 points won the match. If the match was tied 5-5 after 5 sets, a single tie-breaker arrow was used with the closest to center winning.[1]