‘My drag racing career is taking off’: a Paralympic hero’s next steps

Hollywood has been turning Olympic stories into biopics for decades, but – documentaries aside – studios rarely give the blockbuster treatment to Paralympians. After his gold medal at this year’s Paralympics in Paris, however, Team USA archer Matt Stutzman’s career now has the kind of feelgood ending tailor-made for a sports movie.

Indeed, if Stutzman’s life were a film, a fitting climax would feature his Paris semi-final against reigning Paralympic champion He Zihao. It’s worth setting the scene. Each athlete is down to their final arrow. China’s He shoots first and, releasing the arrow with his right hand, strikes the 10-point circle, finishing the round with an almost-perfect cumulative score of 148 (a 150 score is theoretically possible, although no one has ever achieved it at the Paralympics). Sitting on 138 with one arrow remaining, Stutzman needs a 10 to tie the contest. Seemingly nonplussed, he loads the arrow and uses his right foot to pull the bow taut.

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Stutzman and He compete using their foot and hand respectively, owing to the individual nature of their disabilities. Two classifications exist in Paralympic archery. The W1 division is limited to athletes with disabilities in three limbs. Stutzman and He, however, compete in the “open” category, for athletes with disabilities either in their body’s top half, in their bottom half, or on their right or left side. Within this definition exist multitudes. He, for example, uses a wheelchair but has use of both arms. Stutzman, conversely, has full use of his legs and no arms.

Stutzman’s journey to the Paralympics is the product of a lifetime interest in outdoor pursuits and a devotion to archery. Placed for adoption while still an infant, Stutzman was raised by a large family – he has seven siblings – in rural Iowa. His family encouraged Stutzman’s participation in a wide range of activities during what seems to be a childhood drawn by Norman Rockwell – fishing with his father, riding bikes with his siblings (Stutzman would steer by leaning his chest on the handlebars), and feeding the family’s cows.

Although bows and arrows featured in his childhood as well– his father was a bowhunter, as Stutzman is now – he only began engaging with competitive archery later in life. In 2010, at 28 years old, Stutzman started teaching himself the sport after seeing it on television. Just two years later, he became the first “armless archer” (the phrase Stutzman uses to describe himself) in Paralympics history when he competed at the 2012 Games in London. Despite his lack of experience, Stutzman took home the silver medal.

Related: The US doesn’t dominate the Paralympics as it does the Olympics. Does it matter?

Over the next decade, he lived the journeyman life of a professional archer, with mixed results. To those unfamiliar with the sport, the amount of money at stake in archery can be surprising.

“You can easily win $15,000 in one weekend,” says Stutzman. As with other individual sports, certain high-profile tournaments offer significantly more. The winner of the compound open category (Stutzman’s division) at the high-profile Vegas Shootout, for example, takes home $58,000. Many archers, including Stutzman, are also able to supplement their tournament winnings with sponsorships – Stutzman reckons his own income is a roughly 50/50 split between the two.

Many of the most prestigious, non-Paralympic events in which Stutzman entered during this period required him to compete against archers without disabilities. He continued to find success. To give just two brief examples: Stutzman won the 2017 US National Target Championship against non-disabled archers (included multiple American athletes who would go on to win the team event at the World Archery Championships later that year) and, for years, he held the Guinness World Record for the furthest accurate archery shot at 930 ft (283m), a record previously held by an archer without a disability.

Stutzman says archery changed his life. He went from living on Social Security benefits of about $600 a month to earning enough money to take care of his family. Money, however, comes at a cost.

“Archery does not have an off-season. You can literally be doing one or two major tournaments a month, all year round – and we’re talking big-money events, that’s all I went to,” Stutzman says. “You’re gone a week, a week-and-a-half per event. Half your year is away from your family – I was spending two weeks [or more] per month, gone. On the road, by myself, just to make sure that they had food and clothes and a roof over their head … I spent 14 years doing this professionally and I missed so many birthdays, so many Thanksgivings.”

In addition to the stress in his personal life, Stutzman was also struggling to succeed in the competition that had initially jump-started his career, the Paralympics. After earning second-place in London, he crashed out in the round of 16 at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro and the 2020 Tokyo Games. For Stutzman, the problems weren’t physical, but psychological.

“In the past, when I’ve lost the [Paralympic] Games, it’s because of a mental hurdle,” he says. “I can’t believe I missed a shot, and then it stays in my mind, and then you make another bad shot.”

In his 40s as the Paris Games approached, and aware it may be his last chance to win on his sport’s biggest stage, Stutzman changed his preparation strategy. He didn’t just prioritize his mental training – he refrained from training with his bow entirely for two months.

“I would practice mental prep and confidence,” he says. At previous Paralympics, he would “lose confidence in my shot, confidence in my equipment.” Before putting aside his bow to focus on his mind, however, Stutzman introduced one additional non-traditional technique into his training. He realized that, at previous Games, he’d arrived unprepared for the limelight of the Paralympic stage. To turn things around he was prepared to take a very big leap.

“There’s nothing to simulate that adrenaline feeling of the excitement of the crowd, so I had to force my body into feeling that adrenaline [during practice],” he says. He then successfully identified one activity that predictably made his adrenaline peak.

“I’ll warm up [shooting the bow] for a little bit, and then I’ll jump out of a plane, and I’ll land close to my stuff so I can start shooting fairly quickly after I land, that way that adrenaline is still pumping through me,” Stutzman says. “I learned how to control it. I knew how to control the heart rate. I knew how to control the adrenaline.” As Stutzman tells it, it was this training, in particular, that prepared him for his memorable semi-final in Paris.

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A brief recap: with a score of 138 after 14 arrows, Stutzman has one shot remaining in his Paris 2024 semi-final. And he needs to score 10 just to tie. His right foot presses the bow away from his body. He uses his chin to release the string from a small device on his right shoulder and hits the target, scoring … a nine. Stutzman’s done. Or so it seems. Although the judges initially rule the shot a nine, it’s close enough to merit a second look.

“The judge had to get a magnifying glass to see where [the arrow landed]… If it’s a nine, I’m out,” he says. The judges’ inspection reveals that Stutzman’s arrow has just nicked the line, therefore counting for 10 points. The semi-final will come down to a shoot-off. Stutzman recalls this moment as being exactly the reason he’d trained while adrenalized from skydiving.

“Something just came over me and I knew I was going to hit a 10 on my [shoot-off] shot,” he says, sounding a little surprised in his own confidence. “When I was there and that one-arrow shot mattered, I was calm.” Stutzman’s opponent fires first in the shootout, scoring a nine.

“As soon as I hear he shot a nine, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s over.’ I knew I wasn’t going to miss the 10 again,” Stutzman says, accurately as it turns out – his shoot-off arrow landed, yet again, on the line of the 10 circle. Ten points. Stutzman advanced to the final round.

It may seem strange to focus on the semi-final win of an athlete on their way to a gold medal, but even Stutzman notes that his semi-final shootout victory was his tournament’s magic moment.

“That was the pinnacle of the event,” he says. “Once I got by that, I knew the rest of it was going to come easy. I know it’s weird to say that, but it was – I knew at that point that I was going to win.” Yet another accurate prediction. He defeated Ai Xinliang, also of China, in the gold-medal match by scoring 149/150, a Paralympic record.

When remembering his win, Stutzman is quick to mention his family, many of whom were in Paris and had never seen him compete in the Paralympics in person. In addition to the joy of Paralympic glory, he finds peace in the ways his family seem to release any resentment they once held toward Stutzman, a consequence of his frequent absences as a professional archer.

Related: Highs, lows and rapture: the Guardian’s most memorable Paris Paralympic moments

“I bonded with my family and my boys … They’re like, ‘Hey, Dad, all those times you were gone – we understand it now,’” he says. “Now we really talk. We talk about girlfriends, and we talk about their future … Our relationship since we got back [from Paris] is so much better.”

With a screenwriter’s sense for timing, Stutzman is retiring from full-time archery (he plans on continuing to compete in local tournaments, and to carry on bowhunting with his family). In addition to the demands of family life, his doctors say that his hip is wearing out as a result of the strained position he assumes while competing. Conditions seem perfect for Stutzman to walk off into the Iowa sunset …

… except Hollywood loves sequels, and Stutzman’s extraordinary life is such that he has potential chapters in the making. Although Stutzman is leaving competitive archery behind, he has recently started competing in a different sport – drag racing. He already has his racing license and hopes to compete through the National Hot Rod Association (the sport’s highest level in the US) next year.

“My race stuff is actually taking off – it’s starting to get to where it’s about the same level as archery. As in, I’m the only guy without arms that races at this level, and I’m winning events, which is even crazier. I don’t even know how to put that into words,” he says with a laugh.

He also says his racing can help others. “I’m now getting a lot of people that have physical disabilities reaching out to me, like, ‘Hey, it’s awesome that you’re driving a racecar, but I just want to drive a normal car so I can get a job. How do I do that?’ I’m starting to take on this role of teaching people … That’s where I change the world even more, in my opinion.”

Even if his motorsport career fails to take off, Stutzman looks to have made a lasting influence on archery. Although he was unique when he started, four armless archers (including Stutzman) competed in Paris, many of whom have been mentored by Stutzman himself. He is also working with other archers who hope to debut at 2028 Paralympics in Los Angeles. He draws particular attention toward Sheetal Devi, an (also armless) Indian teenager who won a bronze medal in the team event in Paris and a silver medal in the individual event at the last World Archery Para Championships in 2023. Stutzman calls her “the future of armless archers.”

“She is the one who is going to carry it and make it way, way, way bigger than I could ever make it.” This may be true – Devi is already motivating the next generation of Indian para-archers. Even if the sequels are better than the predecessors, however, audiences always maintain a soft spot for an original – and Matt Stutzman is certainly that.