The archer with no arms asked the children to pick a target in the clump of three balloons. Which balloon did they want — white, purple or pink?
Purple, a child replied.
Holding his bow with his right foot and pulling back its string with a tiny hook tucked under his chin, Matt Stutzman let fly. With pinpoint accuracy, his arrow flew across the school hall, punctured the white and pink balloons with a loud pop and left the purple intact.
Photo: AP
“Whoa!” the children marveled.
“He can do that? He’s amazing,” a little girl exclaimed.
And that, one arrow at a time, is how the silver medalist from the 2012 London Paralympics is shaping young minds so they will not grow up with the same prejudices as the people who would not give the US athlete a job before archery changed his life, because he has no arms.
Without work, Stutzman was just looking to put food on the table when he took up archery. Within weeks, he had figured out how to shoot and went into the woods around his home in Fairfield, Iowa, and bagged a deer. Holding the knife with his feet, he was cutting it up when his children came home from school.
“They were like: ‘What is that?’ And I was like: ‘It’s meat,’” he said. “They didn’t know until later that it was a deer.”
Competing in the 2012 Paralympics put him on a new trajectory.
“I had people offering me jobs like crazy and I’m like: ‘I don’t want to work right now. I want to shoot my bow.’”
At this late stage in his trailblazing career, 40-year-old Stutzman said changing thinking about disability is more important to him than the medal he hopes to win at next year’s Paris Paralympics.
“For me, it’s about changing the world, right?” he said. “So, yes, it’s awesome to win a gold. Like who doesn’t want to win a gold? But if I can influence just one person in a positive way by my performance, whether I win or lose, then for me that is a win.”
The children at Funes-Monceau school in Paris certainly got the message. They were thrilled on Wednesday when Stutzman dropped by their class and started out with a cheery “high five?” — reaching out with one of the small stumps that protrude from his shoulders, which the children gleefully fist-bumped.
Visiting France’s capital before Paralympic tickets go on sale next week, Stutzman then gave his young audience a very short version of his astounding life story — born with no arms; put up for adoption when he was three months old; spent the next 10 months in an orphanage before Leon and Jean Stutzman made him their child.
“They taught me how to do everything when I was just a little kid,” he said.
Want to see?
Stutzman tied one of the girls’ shoelaces with his toes. More whoas. He signed autographs with his right foot. Whoas again. When he told them that he holds his fork in a foot to eat, some children grabbed one of their own and wrestled it to their mouths.
“There’s nothing I can’t do. If you can think it, I can do it,” he said. “Which means if I can do it, you can do it, too.”
That is a message that Paralympic organizers hope will be heard on a far larger scale when 4,400 athletes flock to Paris from Aug. 28 to Sept. 8 next year. They are anticipating that athlete performances would not only change perceptions, but that Paris’ preparations would also leave a legacy of improved accessibility and inclusion for people with disabilities. This in a capital city that people with physical disabilities say is tough to navigate, not least because much of its subway system is not accessible for people who use wheelchairs.
“It would have been great if they could do more in the time frame that they had,” said Duane Kale, a vice president of the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) who accompanied Stutzman to the school.
Still, Kale hopes the Paris Games would help normalize disability in France. The nation is under pressure to do better. Citing multiple failings toward adults and children with disabilities, an arm of the Council of Europe, the continent’s foremost human rights body, in April found that France had contravened a European treaty on social and economic rights.
“The impact of the Games will be enormous,” Kale said. “The effect of that will take time and it will change over the years to come, but it wouldn’t have happened if the Games didn’t occur.”
Stutzman is excited about the possibility of competing against as many as three other archers with no arms next year. He was the only one when he won silver in 2012. Because of wear and tear from archery on his hips and knees, Stutzman’s fourth Paralympics could be his last.
Among those his career has inspired are Russian archer Aleksandr Gombozhapov, who also shoots with no arms. Despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, IPC members voted last month to clear a path for some Russians to compete as neutral athletes in Paris.
Stutzman hopes Gombozhapov would be among them and feels that the obstacles his Russian rival has overcome outweigh the backdrop of the war.
“I know what he’s gone through to get to where he’s at,” Stutzman said. “Whatever’s happening is happening and having him compete, I think, just says a lot because he’s an athlete and he’s a person.”
“Archery has changed his life,” Stutzman said. “Like it changed my life.”
The qualifying round of the World Baseball Classic (WBC) is to be held at the Taipei Dome between Feb. 21 and 25, Major League Baseball (MLB) announced today. Taiwan’s group also includes Spain, Nicaragua and South Africa, with two of the four teams advancing onto the 2026 WBC. Taiwan, currently ranked second in the world in the World Baseball Softball Confederation rankings, are favorites to come out of the group, the MLB said in an article announcing the matchups. Last year, Taiwan finished in a five-way tie in their group with two wins and two losses, but finished last on tiebreakers after giving
North Korea’s FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup-winning team on Saturday received a heroes’ welcome back in the capital, Pyongyang, with hundreds of people on the streets to celebrate their success. They had defeated Spain on penalties after a 1-1 draw in the U17 World Cup final in the Dominican Republic on Nov. 3. It was the second global title in two months for secretive North Korea — largely closed off to the outside world; they also lifted the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup in September. Officials and players’ families gathered at Pyongyang International Airport to wave flowers and North Korea flags as the
For King Faisal, a 20-year-old winger from Ghana, the invitation to move to Brazil to play soccer “was a dream.” “I believed when I came here, it would help me change the life of my family and many other people,” he said in Sao Paulo. For the past year and a half, he has been playing on the under-20s squad for Sao Paulo FC, one of South America’s most prominent clubs. He and a small number of other Africans are tearing across pitches in a country known as the biggest producer and exporter of soccer stars in the world, from Pele to Neymar. For
Coco Gauff of the US on Friday defeated top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka 7-6 (7/4), 6-3 to set up a showdown with Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen in the final of the WTA Finals, while in the doubles, Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching was eliminated. Gauff generated six break points to Belarusian Sabalenka’s four and built on early momentum in the opening set’s tiebreak that she carried through to the second set. She is the youngest player at 20 to make the final at the WTA Finals since Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki in 2010. Zheng earlier defeated Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejcikova of the Czech Republic 6-3, 7-5 to book