Tracy Otto sat down with Bloom Tampa Bay host Amber Freeman to walk through one of the most harrowing and improbable journeys in Tampa Bay sports: how a woman left paralyzed and blind in one eye after a brutal attack rebuilt her life as a Paralympic archer. The conversation traced Otto's path from survivor to competitor on the world's biggest adaptive sports stage.
Freeman, who hosts Bloom, interviewed Otto about her journey from surviving an attack meant to kill her to becoming a Paralympic archer, according to WFLA. During the sit-down, Otto also discussed the struggles she has faced in life after enduring a spinal cord injury, the station reports.
The attack that upended Otto's life happened on October 24, 2019, when she and Rick Riessle were attacked at her Tampa home by her ex-boyfriend, according to World Archery. She was left paralyzed from the chest down and lost her left eye, the organization notes.
From Hospital Bed to Archery Range
Otto's path toward competitive sport began a year and a half later. It was in March 2021 that she told her boyfriend, Ricky, she wanted to start doing adaptive sport, per the same World Archery account. That decision set her on a course that would eventually carry her to international podiums.
Her rise through the sport came fast. Otto won her first international medal, an individual gold, at the 2023 Parapan American Games in Santiago, according to her Team USA profile. The following year, she added gold in both the women's W1 and mixed-team events at the 2024 Para Pan American Championships, Team USA's records show.
Competing on the Paralympic Stage in Paris
That string of victories carried Otto to the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, where she placed sixth in the mixed-team W1 event and eighth in the women's individual W1 competition, per Team USA. The results capped a three-year climb from her first steps into adaptive archery to competing among the best in the world.
On Bloom, Otto shared both the triumphs and the hardships that came with rebuilding her life after the injury, discussing the struggles she has faced since the attack alongside the path that led her to the sport, WFLA reports. Her story, as told to Freeman, threads together survival, recovery and elite competition into a single arc centered on her return to form through archery.
