“This is history! This is history!” was heard loudly over the speakers of the Chateauroux Shooting Center. Inside the pit, Adriana Ruano raised both fists and looked towards the stands through tears and a tight smile. Her team immediately came to hug her, a gesture to land her back in the Paris Olympic Games while she continued touching the sky: she had just become the first gold medalist in the history of Guatemala and in the process broke the Olympic sports shooting record.
The 29-year-old shooter completed 45 hits in the 50 shots in the final of the women’s shotgun pit against the Italian Silvana Stanco. They were two more positive shots than the Russian Zuzana Rehak Stefecekova had made in Tokyo 2020, with which the Guatemalan set a new record in Paris and entered the history of the Olympic Games.
Not even during the podium Adriana could avoid emotion. Tears at all times and a wide smile accompanied her throughout the award ceremony. With class in all her movements, even with a handshake just before receiving his medal – leaving aside her fair prominence – to Stanco herself and Penny Smith, the Australian shooter who won the bronze. Emotional, especially, when the Guatemalan anthem sung for the first time in history at the Olympic Games.
“Thank you to all my family, friends. Thank you for your prayers, I felt them and I thank you. Also to God and especially to my father, who is taking care of me from up there,” Ruana said in the pit before those present in Chateauroux.
🇬🇹🇬🇹🇬🇹 GUATEMALA SE BAÑA EN ORO 🥇
¡Adriana Ruano hizo historia de la grande y es campeona olímpica!
¡Y con récord olímpico! ¡Increíble! 👏👏👏#Paris2024 #JuegosOlímpicos I @COGuatemalteco pic.twitter.com/G5FFCXTbvt
— Los Juegos Olímpicos (@juegosolimpicos) July 31, 2024
OLYMPIC DREAM
Adriana Ruano’s Olympic dream did not exactly begin with sports shooting. At the age of 16 she was already standing out in gymnastics in Guatemala and dreamed of qualifying for London 2012. However, in the run-up to the Tokyo 2011 World Cup where she had to seek qualification, she suffered a spinal injury that put her between a rock and a rock. wall: “If I went to the competition I had almost a fifty percent chance of returning in a wheelchair,” the athlete herself confessed to Olympics.
At the end of 2012, Adriana was introduced to shooting sports thanks to a friend of her brother, also a shooter and Guatemalan national team player. From then on his history in sports grew. In Rio 2016 she was a volunteer, in Tokyo 2020 she qualified for the first time as an athlete and in Paris 2024 she became the first Olympic champion from her country.
HISTORICAL GAMES
Adriana Ruano joined the celebration of the Olympic Games that were already historic for Guatemala. Of course the big news is the first gold medal, but precisely one day before the shooter Jean Pierre Brol had won the second Olympic medal in Guatemalan history. It was also in the pit and with a shotgun to win bronze and get on the podium alongside the Chinese Qi Ying with the silver and the British Hales Nathan with the gold.
The shooters Ruano and Brol join a list that, since the beginning of Guatemala’s participation in the Olympic Games in Helsinki 1952, only included Erick Barrondo, winner of silver in the march of London 2012.
In Paris 2024 the Guatemalan Olympic Committee is present with 16 athletes. They still have to participate in different athletics, swimming, shooting and sailing events.
