Hometown Hopefuls: Matt Stutzman, Iowa

Throughout the summer, in a series called Hometown Hopefuls, NBC is spotlighting the stories of Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls from all fifty states, as well as Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, as they work towards the opportunity to represent their country at the Paris 2024 Games next year. We’ll learn about their paths to their sports’ biggest stage, and the towns and communities that have been formative along the way. Visit NBCSports.com/hometownhopefuls for more stories from across America as these Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls prepare for Paris in summer 2024.

In the middle of what hecalled the most meaningful competition of his life, Matt Stutzman rose from his chair and yelled to a reserved crowd.

“I can’t hear no one,” he said in February 2022. “You’re witnessing history.”

Nine minutes later, Stutzman, the “Armless Archer” profiled over the last decade by HBO’s Real Sports, CBS Sunday Morning and others, won his first individual world championship.

The prize was of course special, a gold medal. But the opponent made that night in Dubai greater than the day in London in 2012, when Stutzman won a Paralympic silver medal competing against men with two arms.

In that 2022 World Championships men’s compound final, Stutzman faced Russian Aleksandr Gombozhapov in what he believes was the first time two armless archers met for a global title.

“I care more about what was being witnessed than the actual winning,” he said a year later. 

As World Archery tells it: In 2003, Gombozhapov lost both arms and a leg in a train accident around age 20. After a four-year rehabilitation process, Gombozhapov eventually moved into a house for wheelchair users, got married, became a father and was asked if he wanted to try