BEFORE

Tracy was born in Chicago in November 1995 and now resides outside of Tampa, Florida, where she originally moved in 2018 to study at the University of Tampa on a pre-med track. In the fall of 2019 she was 23 — the kind of person already building toward a career of taking care of other people — steady, ambitious, and in a relationship that she thought was going to be the one she would build her family around. As time went on she discovered that was not the case when the relationship turned dark. She ended things but she had no idea that the hardest part of that breakup hadn't happened yet.

THE NIGHT

On October 24, 2019, Tracy's ex-boyfriend broke into her home outside Tampa. He was armed with a knife and a high-powered pellet gun, and he had already decided she would not survive the night. She was asleep in bed with her new boyfriend, Ricky, when the attack began.

By the end of it, Tracy had been shot in the face, losing her left eye. She had been sexually assaulted with the gun, and she had been stabbed in the back of the neck, severing her spinal cord. Ricky, who refused to leave her, was also shot in the face and stabbed in the back defending her.

Neither of them died. The attacker left the house, sat down on the front lawn, and called the police on himself. He was later sentenced to 40 years in prison.

The injury left Tracy a C5 quadriplegic — paralyzed from the chest down, with little to no function in her hands, unable to regulate her own body temperature with other complications on top of it. She was 23 years old.

THE LONG WAY BACK

What followed was even more betrayal from being left in a nursing home by family members that originally opted to help. The nursing home couldn’t care for her given her complex needs and after Ricky realized what happened he came and brought her back to Florida. Over a year of medical care and rehabilitation took place in the midst of the Covid shutdown before Tracy was strong enough to do much of anything, let alone compete in sports. Ricky stayed. He would go on to become her fiancé, and to this day he also serves as her registered caregiver — the person who did not blink when everything about her life became unrecognizable overnight.

By March of 2021, Tracy was finally cleared to try something physical again. She didn't know yet what that would be.

THE FIRST SHOT

The search that changed her life started with a plain Google query for adaptive sports programs near Tampa. It led her to the All People's Life Center, and to a coach named Earl Brown. She emailed him. He told her to come out and try it.

In her first session, she couldn't hold the bow because her hands don't work the way most people do.. She was falling over from lack of core function. Earl knew just the fix. He  fitted her with a mouth tab — a small device that lets an archer draw and release the bowstring with their teeth instead of their fingers. On her very first shot, she hit the target. There's a video of it; you can hear Ricky in the background, cheering.

She asked Earl a simple question that day: what's the biggest competition this sport has? He told her about the Paralympics. She decided, right there, that this was where she was going.

People who heard that plan — a woman eighteen months removed from a near-fatal attack, learning to shoot a bow with her mouth — had every reason to be skeptical. She wasn't interested in their doubt.

HOW SHE SHOOTS

Tracy's release system has changed over time as she has gotten stronger and the need for precision and accuracy rises. It is its own small feat of engineering: a traditional wrist release rigged with a camera-shutter cable that runs up and over her hat and drops down in front of her face, ending in a bite pin. She clamps down with her teeth to fire the shot. She is currently testing out a new release that will allow her to shoot more like an able bodied person with the help of her current coach Matt Hall. It's the kind of solution that doesn't show up in a highlight reel but explains everything about how she approaches problems — adapt the tool until it fits the body you actually have, then compete like the tool was never the story.

THE CLIMB

Tracy's rise in the sport was fast by any measure. Grants and donations from her online community and Ricky's family helped fund a breakout 2023 season that put her on the map. That November, at the Para Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile, she won gold in the women's W1 individual division — and secured the quota slot that would send Team USA to the Paralympic Games in Paris. She was 28.

In the spring of 2024, at the Para Pan American Championships, she went back-to-back: gold in the individual W1 event and gold again in the mixed team event. By the summer, World Archery Americas had named her Archer of the Year.

Three years after her first arrow ever left a bow, Tracy  was a Paralympian.

PARIS

At the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, Tracy was the only U.S. woman to qualify in the W1 classification — archers with impairment in all four limbs, as well as the trunk who compete using specialized equipment.  Not only that but she went in ranked No. 1 in the world in her division. She finished 8th individually and helped the U.S. mixed team finish 6th. It was her first Games.

Her disability made even the ceremonial parts of the Games a competition of their own: her body doesn't regulate heat, and the four-hour opening ceremony in late-August Paris was too much for her to sit through in full. She competed anyway, in the same week.

"Making beauty out of ashes… rising as a phoenix would." — Tracy Otto, to AFP, Paris 2024

She has never framed Paris as the ending of her story. It was closer to the moment the rest of the world caught up to what she already knew about herself.

LOVE, UNDETERRED

Ricky never left. He was there the night of the attack, hurt trying to protect her. He was there through the nursing home, through rehab, through every version of Tracy that emerged in the years after. During their trip to Paris for the Games, he proposed to her under the Eiffel Tower. The following day their engagement went global as well as the announcement that Tracy was pregnant due in January 2025.

  They are engaged, building a life and a household together in Tampa alongside Tracy's father, an Air Force veteran.

RYLEE

In January  2025 — just months after Paris — Tracy became a mother. Something that was thought to be impossible after the injuries she sustained and years of trying. Her daughter arrived after Tracy working to rebuild independence in a body that fought her for every inch of it, and motherhood brought its own new set of questions no one had answered for her before: how do you parent from a wheelchair, with limited hand function, when so much of caregiving is built around hands that work.

She has been candid in a way that no one prepares you for what that actually feels like — the joy of it stacked directly on top of the hard, unglamorous parts. She has chosen, publicly, to keep her daughter's face and identity private even as she shares the rest of her life.

A BIGGER BOW

In the years since Paris, Tracy's story has moved beyond the archery field. In 2024 she was named to the BBC's 100 Women list in recognition of her advocacy for survivors of domestic violence. She was profiled by People Magazine and by World Archery. In 2026, adidas brought her on — alongside fellow Paralympian Haven Shepherd and Ironman athlete Chris Nikic — as one of the athletes who helped design and test the Supernova Rise 3 Adaptive, the brand's first performance running shoe built from the ground up with input from disabled athletes, developed with TBWA\Canada and GAMUT Management.

"The entire team was devoted to making this the best adaptive shoe available." — Tracy Otto, on the adidas Supernova Rise 3 Adaptive

Tracy now operates as the founder and CEO of  Otto Media LLC, building out a platform that spans keynote speaking, brand partnerships, content, and consulting — all anchored to her competitive career rather than replacing it. She speaks and writes under the identity "Forged, Not Finished": the idea that a life interrupted by violence doesn't have to be defined by it, and that she is still, actively, becoming.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Tracy is training toward the Los Angeles 2028 Paralympic Games — this time not as a newcomer nobody expected to qualify, but as a sitting Archer of the Year and a returning national team athlete with a medal-round résumé and four more years of development behind her.

She is also building the next chapter of her career off the field: speaking engagements, brand partnerships, and a media platform built on the same principle that got her through 2019 and into a mouth-tab bow at the All People's Center — that faith and forward motion don't require sight of the whole path, only the willingness to draw the string back one more time.