Matt Stutzman believes that controlling adrenaline is crucial if you want to be a successful archer. So he used to have a quick parachute jump before training. “I literally would shoot my bow, get on a plane and jump out,” he says. “Then I would land close by, shoot my bow until the adrenaline wore off and then go back up and jump out again.”
This may not be the kind of training approach that works for every athlete, but Stutzman is a bit different from the norm. For a start the American from Iowa is a world champion archer, and recreational parachutist, who was born with no arms. He is also someone who, since childhood, has been in determined pursuit of what he calls a “Michael Jordan moment”, the point where one person not only changes their sport but the perception of it. And come the Paralympics in Paris in a year’s time, it seems likely he will have achieved his ambition.
Stutzman is known as the “Armless Archer”, and not just because of the alliteration. When he first entered competition at the turn of the 2010s he was the first person to try shooting a bolt at a target without using fingers, wrist or triceps. His technique involves picking up an arrow and loading it with his toes, using a release mechanism attached to his shoulder to connect his body to his bow, then leaning back in his seat to fire. It was with this technique that, in 2015, Stutzman hit a target from 310 yards, setting a world record for the longest accurate shot taken in archery, whether by someone with a disability or not.
The release mechanism is the only part of Stutzman’s equipment adapted to accommodate his disability. This is the way he likes it and the way he’s always been since his childhood. “I told my dad I was going to be a basketball player,” he recalls. “He went and got me a basketball and a hoop and said ‘here, go practise’. He knew I was never going to be a Michael Jordan but I told him I was. That mindset … carried over into everything that I tried … and that’s when I came across archery.”
Stutzman says he learned about the sport watching TV one night and was spurred into action when he Googled “teach an armless man to shoot a bow” and came up with nothing. “I remember going to an archery store and telling a guy I wanted to buy a bow,” Stutzman says with a chuckle. “The guy said to me, ‘you need a crossbow, because a crossbow is like a gun and easier to shoot.’ I said: ‘No, I want a compound bow’. He said, ‘how are you going to shoot it?’ And I didn’t know, I just wanted one.”
Stutzman bought the bow anyway and was soon entering competitions alongside non-disabled athletes using a technique he had created himself. He found himself a sponsor and when a friend suggested that the sponsor was only paying him “because you have no arms”, Stutzman’s Jordan mode kicked in. “It started then”, he says. “Eight hours a day in a chair for pretty much the next eight years. That was all I did, practise and practise and practise.”
Within a year of focusing on his new passion, Stutzman was at the Paralympic Games in London winning silver in the men’s individual compound. He was the world’s top-ranked para archer for the next four years. After a period in the doldrums, followed by the interruption of the pandemic, Stutzman won his first individual World Para Archery title in February last year, scoring a perfect 30 in his final round. The scenes in Dubai were raucous – “world champ baby!” was Stutzman’s refrain to the crowd – but also emotional.
Stutzman won gold by beating the Russian Aleksandr Gombozhapov. Gombozhapov is also an armless archer. As is the Belgian Piotr Van Montagu, whom Stutzman beat in the semi-final. When he had first picked up a bow in competition, Stutzman was the only archer with his disability. Just over a decade later there are now others – men and women – not only following his example, but excelling.
This is Stutzman’s Jordan moment: he has made change happen. But an increase in armless archers speaks not just to the 40-year-old’s power as a role model, but to the growth of para sport more broadly. So when it comes to Paris next year, Stutzman is clear as to what he would like to see happen. “Winning is OK, it’s good right?” he says. “But you know how good it would be to have one, two and three all armless archers? Because that really makes a statement about what the Paralympics are. We’re trying to grow the sport, trying to grow the Paralympics as a whole and even if I was the number four guy I would still feel it was like a gold medal because of what we’d accomplished.”
Tickets for the Paris Paralympic Games are on sale at https://tickets.paris2024.org
