USA have followed up their impressive triumph at Tlaxcala to reach the recurve women team gold medal match at Madrid 2026 – stage four of the Hyundai Archery World Cup.
Casey Kaufhold and Jennifer Mucino were in the team a fortnight ago that swept past Mexico 5-1 in the 2026 Pan American Championships and, with Catalina Gnoriega replacing Olivia Martin this time, have guaranteed their first team medal of the World Cup season.
Last year, the three athletes conquered the competition at Antalya 2025 which included an incredible shoot-off victory over world leaders Korea, and they will face the Olympic gold medallists once again on Sunday, who are also looking for their maiden top podium finish of 2026.
“We had a really good season as a team last year, and honestly, this year we’ve been shooting well, just not winning the matches, and sometimes you just have to trust in the process and know that if we keep doing our job, it’ll be there,” said Kaufhold after she dropped four 10s in the USA’s 5-3 victory over Chinese Taipei in the semifinals. “I think today was a great example of that, where maybe we didn’t qualify as high as we would have liked, but through the matches we shot so well and just really trust each other as a team.”
“It’s definitely deceiving on this field because you don’t feel a lot of wind, but it actually pushes your arrows a lot. So even with the flag only moving a little bit, we were sometimes aiming on the nine-eight line and even into the red, when on most fields you would probably just aim a little off in the yellow.”
“It was definitely tricky and we really just had to make good calls. We’d step off the line and say, ‘Hey, that was a good shot, I aimed here, it landed here, so trust your judgment and make a good shot,’ just really communicating as we went through each arrow, so each of us knew where to aim based on how the wind looked.”
Whilst wind has always been a hindrance to archers on any shooting line, it has been a thorn in every archer’s side at all three World Cup venues before Madrid.
