USA Wins 3 Pan Am Archery Golds | Archery Weekly Jun 22-28

Three team golds in a single afternoon. That is what the United States walked away with from Tlaxcala on June 25, and it set the tone for an archery week that was busier off the shooting line than most people expected. The Pan American Archery Championships doubled as the main qualifier for the Lima 2027 Pan American Games, which feeds straight into the LA28 Olympic pathway, so every match in Mexico carried weight that a normal continental event does not. Here is everything worth knowing from June 22–28.

USA Sweeps the Pan American Archery Championships Team Events

The American recurve squads did exactly what their seeding promised. Casey Kaufhold, Olivia Martin and Jennifer Mucino beat Mexico 5–1 in sets to defend the women’s recurve team title they won in 2024. On the men’s side, Brady Ellison, Nicholas D’Amour and Christian Stoddard edged Colombia 5–3, the match only settling in the fourth set. Then the compound men — Gaius Carter, James Lutz and Louis Price — closed out Colombia 236–234 to make it three golds in the team rounds.

Mexico kept the home crowd loud by taking the one title the USA could not. Andrea Becerra, Adriana Castillo and Dafne Quintero tied Colombia at 29 in the compound women’s final and won it in a shoot-off, the kind of one-arrow finish that compound team archery lives for. Becerra, fresh off her individual gold in Antalya earlier this month, is quietly stacking together one of the strongest seasons of any compound archer in the Americas.

Worth noting for the record books: 181 archers from 19 countries shot in Tlaxcala over the week, at the Centro de Atletismo “Una Nueva Historia.” That is a deep field for a continental championship, and it reflects how seriously every federation in the region now treats the Pan Am circuit as an Olympic stepping stone rather than a regional bragging-rights event. Ten years ago a sweep like this would have been expected. In 2026 the USA had to earn all three.

The Individual Finals and a Loaded Bracket

The team rounds grabbed the medals, but the individual brackets are where the names you recognise collided. Kaufhold opened her run against Canada’s Virginie Chénier, while teammate Mucino drew home favourite Angela Ruiz — a tough way to reach a final. The recurve men’s half delivered the matchup everyone wanted: Ellison against Brazil’s Marcus D’Almeida, a rivalry that has decided medals on three continents now.

D’Almeida shooting his way through the American bracket is worth watching for one reason: he is the clearest argument that the Americas are no longer a two-country story. For years, Pan Am recurve came down to the USA and Mexico trading sets. Brazil, Colombia and Chile have closed that gap, and the team results below the gold line proved it — Chile pushed into the recurve men’s top three, and Brazil grabbed a qualification spot in both recurve divisions.

What the Lima 2027 Quotas Actually Mean

This is the part casual fans skip, and they shouldn’t. Tlaxcala was not just about who got the medal — it was about who books a plane ticket. The top five recurve teams and top four compound teams earned country quota places for the Lima 2027 Pan American Games, three athletes per recurve team and two per compound team.

For recurve, the men’s quota went to the USA, Colombia, Chile, Mexico and Brazil; the women’s to the USA, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Guatemala. In compound, the men’s spots landed with the USA, Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala, while the women’s went to Mexico, Colombia, the USA and Puerto Rico. A second round of individual qualification handed spots to Cuba, Canada, El Salvador, Argentina and Venezuela — nations that didn’t make the team cut but still earned a seat at the table. Lima 2027 then becomes the Americas’ primary qualifier for the Los Angeles Olympics, so a quiet week in Tlaxcala has consequences that stretch all the way to 2028.

Bear Archery Pulls Gold Tip and Bee Stinger Under One Roof

The biggest gear story of the week was a business one. Bear Archery (through parent company Escalade) has folded Gold Tip carbon arrows and Bee Stinger stabilizers into its portfolio, meaning a single company now builds your bow, your arrows and your front-bar setup. For target shooters and bowhunters who mix and match brands, consolidation like this usually cuts two ways: tighter integration and bundled deals on one side, fewer independent options on the other.

My read? It is good news for the average buyer in the short term. Gold Tip’s manufacturing was already strong, and pairing it with Bear’s distribution should keep premium carbon shafts on shelves and competitively priced. The risk is longer term — when one company owns the bow, the arrow and the stabilizer, the pressure to keep each line independently excellent fades. Watch whether Gold Tip’s higher-end target shafts get the same attention now that they’re inside a hunting-first brand.

Stocking up before the consolidation shakes out pricing? Our aluminum practice arrows are a cheap way to keep volume up without burning your match shafts.

The 2026 Bows Are Still the Talk of the Range

Bow season buzz hasn’t slowed down. The Mathews ARC platform — the ARC 30 at roughly 348 fps IBO and the longer ARC 34 for steadier holding — is still the bow most shops can’t keep in stock, thanks to the SWX-2 cam and Mathews’ Perimeter Weight Technology smoothing out the cycle. Hoyt’s Carbon RX-10 brought the HBX Gen 4 cam to its carbon platform, and Bear’s new flagship Redeem leaned into a lightweight riser and the EKO² cam to undercut the premium crowd on price.

If you’re shopping this summer ahead of fall hunting season, the honest advice is to ignore the IBO speed war. The 5–8 fps separating these flagships matters far less than how a bow holds at full draw and how it feels at the shot. Shoot all three before you buy — the ARC and the RX-10 reward a longer valley, while the Redeem is the friendliest draw cycle of the bunch for a newer archer. If you want a deeper breakdown of what to prioritise, our 2026 compound bow buying guide walks through draw weight, axle-to-axle and brace height without the marketing fog.

A new bow deserves a consistent trigger. A solid four-finger release aid does more for your groups than another 5 fps ever will.

The ATA Show Is Going Public in 2026

For decades the ATA Show was a closed-door, members-only trade event — the place where dealers saw next year’s gear before anyone else. That changes in January. The 2026 edition splits into three pieces: a focused two-day ATA Trade Show for the industry, a public-facing Archery & Bowhunting Supershow on January 9–10, and the NFAA’s Rushmore Rumble national tournament, all at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis.

This is a bigger deal than it sounds. The ATA Show is where every major brand launches its flagship, and for the first time regular archers and bowhunters can walk the floor, handle the new bows and watch demos that were previously industry-only. Whether opening the doors waters down the trade side or grows the whole sport is the open question — but for buyers, more access to launch-day gear is hard to argue against.

The timing matters too. Relocating the NFAA’s Rushmore Rumble from Yankton to Indianapolis ties a national tournament to the launch calendar, so 2026 buyers can watch top shooters compete with the same bows hitting shelves that month. For a sport that has long kept its industry and its grassroots in separate rooms, that overlap is the most interesting thing about the whole reshuffle.

Watch: 2026 Recurve Team Highlights

If you missed the live finals from Tlaxcala (they streamed on archery+), this World Archery recurve highlights reel from the 2026 World Cup season is a good primer on the level these Pan Am teams are shooting at — the same archers, the same pressure, end after end.

Looking Ahead

The calendar barely takes a breath. The Hyundai World Archery Para Series resumes in Nové Město, Czechia from June 30 to July 4, with 177 para archers from 30 nations — including world number ones Sheetal Devi and Toman Kumar — competing across recurve, compound, W1 and visually impaired categories. It’s the most underrated event on the summer schedule, and the adaptive gear on display (release aids, mouth tabs, shooting stands) is genuinely worth a look even if you shoot able-bodied.

From there, the Hyundai Archery World Cup heads to Madrid for stage four (July 7–12), the last stop before the season’s World Cup Final in Saltillo, Mexico in September. New to the sport and trying to make sense of all these bow types flying around the results pages? Start with our breakdown of the differences between recurve and compound bows, then catch up on what you missed in last week’s roundup. We’ll be back next Monday with another week of results, gear and the stories that actually matter.

Sources

1. World Archery — Lima 2027 Pan Am Games spots won as team competition wraps in Tlaxcala
2. World Archery Americas — USA wins three gold medals in the team events at Tlaxcala 2026
3. World Archery — Final fours decided at Tlaxcala 2026 Pan Am Championships
4. Bowhunting.com — The ATA Show is going public in 2026
5. Bear Archery — 2026 lineup and the Gold Tip / Bee Stinger acquisition
6. World Archery — Paralympic stars return to Nové Město for the Para Series