Three-time Olympic medalist Brady Ellison and 17-year-old Casey Kaufhold are the first members of the U.S. Olympic archery team. They hope four more will join them before the Tokyo Games.
Ellison and Kaufhold won the Olympic Trials that finished Tuesday to earn the Olympic spots so far available.
The U.S. can still qualify full men’s and women’s teams at an event in Paris in late June. If they do, Jack Williams and Jacob Wukie and Mackenzie Brown and Jennifer Mucino-Fernandez are in line to join Ellison and Kaufhold in Tokyo.
Ellison, 32, earned two silvers and a bronze between the 2012 and 2016 Olympics. In 2019, he became the first American to win an individual world title in archery’s Olympic discipline — recurve — since 1985.
The last American to earn Olympic archery gold was Justin Huish, the ponytailed, backwards-cap wearing phenom who swept individual and team titles at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
Kaufhold is in line to become the third-youngest U.S. Olympic archer ever after Denise Parker (14 in 1988) and Henry Richardson (15 in 1904), according to Olympedia.org.
Khatuna Lorig, a 47-year-old who competed at the Olympics in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008 and 2012, was ninth at Trials. Lorig memorably taught actress Jennifer Lawrence how to shoot a bow and arrow for the film, “The Hunger Games.”
LIST: U.S. athletes qualified for Tokyo Olympics
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