At the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Ellison’s performance in Friday’s mixed team final, where he secured bronze alongside Casey Kaufhold, felt like an early warning. The composure was unmistakable. Something was in the air.
Almost no-one had him pencilled in as a real contender beforehand – not even him, after a largely underwhelming outdoor season, made even more complicated by a significant change to his draw length introduced barely three weeks earlier.
“If you had told me three weeks ago that I’d be standing on a podium, I would have said you were high,” Ellison himself said afterwards.
But when he turned up on the practice field, heads and binoculars started to turn. Perhaps only he could have engineered that turnaround – a convergence of experience, resilience and timing.
We know the rest: he slashed through the field on the way to what most agree was the greatest men’s final ever seen at an Olympic Games. It hardly seemed fair that such a heavyweight contest was decided by a handful of millimetres between his arrows and Kim Woojin’s in the shoot-off.
In the process, Brady became the most decorated U.S. Olympic archer of all time by medal count – an extraordinary achievement, reached not through bravado but through maturity and perspective.
