A spinal injury ended Adriana Ruano's chances of competing at the Olympics as a gymnast. She came back as a shooter and won Guatemala's first gold medal on Wednesday.
Ruano was training for the 2011 world championships in gymnastics, a qualifier for the London Olympics the following year, when she felt pain in her back.
Scans showed she had six damaged vertebrae — a career-ending injury at age 16 — and she spent a year recovering, wearing a brace. Ruano's doctor recommended she take up shooting if she wanted to stay in sports without aggravating her injured back.
"When I had my injury, I didn't have anything. I started to get desperate, and I was frustrated. Then the door opened for me with this sport," Ruano said.
More than a decade after Ruano swapped the balance beam and vault for a shotgun, her doctor's advice paid off Wednesday when she won the women's trap with an Olympic-record score of 45 out of 50.
Ruano closed her eyes and took a deep breath before hitting her 43rd target to make sure Italian silver medalist Silvana Stanco couldn't catch her for the gold. 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 last Olympics in Tokyo, shortly after her father had died.
Coming into Paris, though, she was the defending Pan-American Games champion.
Now she has given her country an Olympic gold medal, a day after Jean Pierre Brol won bronze in the men's trap to claim Guatemala's first medal since race walker Erick Barrondo's silver at the 2012 London Olympics.
Stanco won the silver on 40 and Australia's Penny Smith took the bronze.
