Alexis Ruiz: When winning is anything but easy

“I even made a comment to my mom that today just kind of feels easy, and that's not something that comes around very often.”

Those were words uttered by Alexis Ruiz way back in May when she qualified as the compound women’s top seed at the Shanghai 2026 Hyundai Archery World Cup, but they rang especially true by the time she reached Saltillo.

For any elite sporting competition, it should rarely be “easy” for athletes, although you would still expect the odd bit of fortune to favour you, to reward your talent and dedication.

“The harder I work, the luckier I get” is a famous line from South African golfer Gary Player, and Ruiz undoubtedly put in the long hours to claim the coveted World Cup trophy. But luck, or rather a lack of it, seemed to come to the fore more often than not for her in Saltillo – and throughout the circuit this year – before she eventually worked her way to the top step of the podium at Plaza de Armas.

Whilst matches at this level are often close, Ruiz really did have her fair share of them throughout the season.

In the 36 matches the double Pan American gold medallist competed in at outdoor World Archery events in 2026 – including compound women’s team and mixed team matches – 14 were either shoot-offs or decided by a single point.

Incredibly, she lost only four of those. But painfully for Ruiz, they came at some of the cruellest moments.

In the women’s team event, she was part of the 232-233 losses to India and Türkiye in the Puebla and Shanghai gold matches. In the mixed team semifinal at stage one, she and Stephan Hansen were defeated 156-157 by the Netherlands.

Her only individual loss in this pattern was arguably the most bewildering. Ruiz and Lisell Jaatma both shot 149 – only one nine each – in the Shanghai women’s individual semifinal to force a shoot-off, which Jaatma won before going on to take the stage title.

These tough defeats around Puebla and Shanghai were also either side of a fourth-place finish at the Easton Foundations Gator Cup, one of the biggest outdoor competitions on USA Archery’s calendar. Ruiz found that particularly disheartening, losing the semifinal to national teammate Olivia Dean, 144-145.

“Fourth place is probably one of the hardest finishes because you’re the first one off the podium,” said the 27-year-old archer from Arizona. “I was so disappointed. I didn’t have the best day ever, but I knew it was a really quick turnaround, so I really went back to the drawing board and figured out what went wrong in my process.”

She identified the timing of her shots as the main issue and worked on it when she returned home, giving herself a 13-second shot clock in training to help commit to each shot.

“I feel like that helped me commit more to my shot,” she said. “Then my goal was to bring that timing into this event because I didn’t want to feel like I did at the Gator Cup again.”

In short, it worked.

Ruiz’s next competition following Shanghai was Tlaxcala 2026, and for many in Mexico that week, it was the biggest competition of the outdoor season.

You could say she timed her adjustment perfectly for the continental tournament. She defeated the eventual Saltillo silver medallist Dafne Quintero, the 2025 South American champion Alejandra Usquiano and the greatest ever Sara Lopez in succession – the win against Lopez the only one by a single point, 148-147 – to successfully defend her Pan American crown.

On top of that, she and James Lutz picked up gold in the compound mixed team.

But for all of Ruiz’s momentum heading into Saltillo, what came next threw it all into the air.

The Arizona native – a qualified nurse at a children’s hospital away from the shooting line – endured a car crash in her home city of Phoenix.

Thankfully, her injuries were minor, with no broken bones or internal bleeding, although Ruiz revealed that her ribs, shoulders and hips were “pretty bruised”. A truck had hit the driver’s side door directly, sending the left side of her body, including her head, into the door and window.

“I was very lucky during the car crash to come out with the least amount of injuries as possible,” she said.

Ruiz was not allowed to shoot for 10 days after the accident and had to rebuild her training gradually. Even by the time she travelled to Saltillo, she was barely managing more than 100 arrows a day.

The incident occurred on 8 August, just nine days before World Archery announced the final confirmed line-up, with Ruiz making the 32-athlete roster based on the points she had accrued from Puebla, Shanghai and Madrid 2026.

She had just a month before she would fly to Saltillo, and training in such a short space of time with that extent of injuries was never going to be easy.

Being part of the colourful Thursday night draw on 10 September was therefore an achievement in itself. But little did the Vegas Shoot runner-up know, when she was drawn against Jaatma for the second time that season, that she had one more big hurdle to clear.

Their match was even more dramatic than their meeting in Shanghai.

After building an 89-86 lead against the Estonian, Ruiz struggled with the Saltillo breeze in the last two ends, shooting 28 and 26 to Jaatma’s 30 and 27 and forcing another shoot-off.

Both shot nines, but Ruiz’s was visibly closer to the 10. The line judge, however, raised the wrong arm, pointing towards Jaatma’s target, much to the confusion of everyone watching in Mexico and at home..

Ruiz was understandably upset backstage as she and coach Mel Nichols scrambled to appeal the result, which was swiftly overturned.

“I honestly hardly remember that [semifinal] match against Sara [Lopez],” said an emotional Ruiz in a post-match interview, which you can watch on archery+. “My emotions were just all over the place. It was so hard to settle down after the loss and then thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m back to shooting again.’

“I was just trying to keep my emotions in check long enough to shoot my bow.”

Raising the wrong arm is an honest mistake that does happen in competitions. But again, it seemed Ruiz’s unlucky streak from the beginning of the season had returned – feeling even more unfair given the car crash she had recently endured.

What was momentarily a sad beginning became a happy ending.

She may not remember ending nine-time World Cup champion Lopez’s chances of getting number 10, but her 145-144 victory against Dafne Quintero – who had home advantage as a Mexican and Coahuilan – will live long in the memory as she became the winner of the 20th World Cup Final.

Not because of who she had beaten, but because of the circumstances.

Not because she became only the third compound women’s champion from the USA since 2006 – following Erika Jones and Jamie Van Natta – but because of everything she had faced head-on in Saltillo and throughout the season.

“I think I realised a new capability of who I am and what I can handle,” she said, teary-eyed after the gold medal match.

The trophy is thus more than a trophy for Alexis Ruiz – a reminder that she can deal with the rough of archery and life as well as the easy, which, as she said herself, doesn’t come around very often.