How Casey Kaufhold has mastered the art of winning

In sport, a true champion will manifest their outcomes by mastering the art of coming out on top.

No matter how ugly, how lost their cause may be, champions always seem to find a way to get over the line when it seems least possible. It is no different in archery.

Although, if anything, it might be harder.

One day you could be shooting perfect scores, the next you couldn’t find anything past the eight, such is the fickleness of form the sport can conjure.

Casey Kaufhold has seen fragility first-hand – from the other side – after she stunned Tokyo 2020 women’s individual, team and mixed team champion An San two years ago at the Hyundai World Archery Championships in Yankton, going on to win silver.

“You see great people have the season of their life and have one tournament that might not just be their day and everyone’s like ‘What happened? They’re world number one, Olympic Champion’,” she says.

“You can’t be great at every competition.”

Kaufhold is bidding to become USA’s first recurve women’s individual Olympic medallist in Paris this summer since Luann Ryon’s triumph at Montreal 1976. Like Ryon, Kaufhold seems to have found those winning minerals.

Since her second-round elimination in Tokyo, where she made her Olympic debut as a 17-year-old, Kaufhold has consistently featured in the back-end of major tournaments, most recently winning the test event in Paris and the 2024 Pan American Championships.

This know-how of major tournaments may seem an ambiguous, untrainable skill to some, but Kaufhold believes she already has it at just 20. “I think the best way to make sure it’s your day for when it matters is to learn how to win when you’re not at your best.”

“Figure out how to make it good enough, picking that one thing in your shot that if you know is on, like at least 90%, then it’s going to go.”

“Even though it may not be your best day, you still know how to prevail.”

These can come across as strange comments to archery fans.

The goal of the sport is, ultimately, perfection. Dropping a perfect score, a 10 when it’s necessary, a perfect set, is seen as the ultimate indicator of high performance, so often leading to game-changing moments in a match, and life-changing moments in an athlete’s career.

It’s why the pent-up emotion tends to overflow, afterwards.

The determined hunt for perfection completely takes over the mind of archers on the shooting line, understandably, but Kaufhold believes it actually hinders performance. 

“You can’t put more value on one arrow over another because that’s when nerves get in. If you think you’re giving 110 percent, you’re giving too much,” she said. “I just give it what I have and that is everything.”

The cliché is one athletes often refer to after they’ve won their first Olympic medal.

Kaufhold is one of the favourites to get onto the podium in Paris and make history for USA. If she is successful, perhaps her unusual approach will both buck the trend of her nation’s Olympic results – and the mindset of elite archery in general.

Competition at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games starts on 25 July.