Ex-gymnast shoots to Guatemala's first-ever gold

A spinal injury ended Adriana Ruano’s Olympic dream as a gymnast. She came back as a shooter and won Guatemala’s first Olympic gold medal Wednesday.

Ruano was training for the 2011 world championships in gymnastics, a qualifier for the London Olympics the next year, when she felt pain in her back. An MRI showed that the then-16-year-old had six damaged vertebrae — a career-ending injury — and Ruano’s doctor recommended she take up shooting if she wanted to stay in sports without aggravating her injured back.

That advice paid off Wednesday as Ruano won gold in the women’s trap with an Olympic-record score of 45 out of 50.

“When I was younger, I was dreaming about [competing in] Olympics in gymnastics,” she said. “I never thought I’d excel in this sport. It was all new to me. It was only when I started viewing and visiting shooting events that I thought it would be possible to represent Guatemala in Olympics Games.

“Lately, my dream was to win the gold medal in Olympics.”

Ruano closed her eyes and took a deep breath before hitting her 43rd target to make sure of the gold with five shots remaining. She missed her next two shots after that, but it didn’t matter.

It was a stint volunteering at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro that put her on the path back to elite-level sports.

“I said to myself, ‘If I can’t be there as an athlete, maybe I can be there as a volunteer’, so I applied,” she said. “They put me on shooting, and I was able to watch my teammates. I could see the competition, and that was the moment that inspired me to think, ‘OK, maybe if not in gymnastics, I can do it in shooting.'”

Ruano placed 26th at the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, shortly after her father had died.

Guatemala had never won a gold medal at the Olympics and had only one medal of any kind in its history until Tuesday, when Jean Pierre Brol won bronze in the men’s trap.

Italy’s Silvana Stanco won the silver with 40, and Australia’s Penny Smith took the bronze with 32.

Tokyo champion Zuzana Rehak Stefecekova did not make the final, and world No. 1 Fatima Galvez came in fifth.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.