Paris Olympics 2024: Guatemalan Adriana Ruano Oliva wins historic gold in women's trap shooting

The 29-year-old sets an Olympic record while winning first the gold for Guatemala at the summer games.

Adriana Ruano Oliva created sporting – and national – history as she earned Guatemala’s first Olympic gold medal, and third Games medal of any hue, by winning the trap women event with an Olympic record of 45 out of 50.

The 29-year-old former gymnast’s triumph came just a day after her 41-year-old team-mate Jean Pierre Brol Cardenas had won Paris Olympics 2024 bronze in the trap men event, securing what was only his country’s second Olympic medal following Erick Barrondo’s silver in the men’s 20km walk at London 2012.

Now Adriana Ruano Oliva – who dominated from start to finish in a final where silver went to Italy’s Silvana Stanco, who totalled 40, and bronze to Penny Smith of Australia – has elevated her country to the ultimate sporting pinnacle.

Before competition Adriana Ruano Oliva says she likes to listen to the Macklemore and Ryan Lewis song “Can’t Hold Us.” The lyrics of that song include a reference to “chasing dreams since I was 14.” That will resonate strongly with someone whose sporting ambitions began as a gymnast and who took part in the Pan American Games as a teenager only to have to quit the sport the following year after suffering serious injury.

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Adriana Ruano Oliva turned to shooting – with results. Last year she won the Pan American Games trap title in Santiago as her team-mate Waleska Soto took silver, with both competing for the Independent Athletes Team because of the International Olympic Committee’s suspension of the Guatemala National Olympic Committee in August 2022 because of irregularities.

Thankfully the IOC’s provisional lifting of that ban on March 20 this year enabled Ruana’s and Cardenas’s successes to be celebrated in full style, with national flags waving and, in the case of the former, the national anthem playing. Adriana Ruano Oliva’s mother wept tears of joy in the stands.

Adriana Ruano Oliva, who had finished third in the morning’s final qualification behind the Spanish pair of 22-year-old Mar Molne Magrina and world No.1 Fatima Galvez, took a grip on this event from the start that she never looked faintly likely to relinquish as temperatures at the Chateauroux Shooting Centre ranged up to the 40C mark.

She scored with her first 16 shots and moved steadily away from all opposition, securing gold with the first of her final five efforts which brought her total to 43, which equalled the Olympic record set at the Tokyo 2020 Games by Slovakia’s Zuzana Stefecekova, who had missed out on reaching the final after finishing 12th in qualification.

After missing the next two of her four remaining efforts, Adriana Ruano Oliva re-focused to shatter the last two clays and establish a new mark in her own right. As the stands grew frenzied with Guatemala flags and the realisation of what she had achieved began to sink in, the tears arrived.

For Stanco, the 2023 World Cup Final champion, silver was a very acceptable step-up from the fifth place she had achieved in the Tokyo 2020 final three years earlier, and the same went too for Smith, sixth in Tokyo, who maintained her composure to head off the lingering challenge of Molne Magrina, who won two World Cup titles last year and finished one place ahead of her senior colleague.

Galvez never recovered from a nightmare start which saw her miss four of her five opening efforts, and although she recovered sufficiently to avoid being the first athlete to make their exit – finishing one shot ahead of China’s Wu Cuicui, making her Olympic debut aged 36 – she could not survive another round.

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