What started as a day of cleaning junk from a basement turned into a friendly bet for Crystal Gauvin and her husband. They found an old compound bow, and outside were some targets. So her husband, Rich, bet his wife he could hit the middle of the target more times than her.

As a former competitive swimmer growing up, Crystal accepted the challenge. She beat her husband in a match despite having never shot a bow in her life.

“He’s super competitive, too, so he said let’s do the best out of three,” she said.

She won, and then won the best of five. At that point, they decided to take her “beginner’s luck” to a local archery range. She joined a league and eventually entered a local tournament, where she won by a hundred points. 

Since that day seven years ago Crystal Gauvin rose to the No. 2 spot in the world for women’s compound, winning a silver medal at the 2015 world championships and nearly a dozen world cup medals, and then she shifted to recurve, the Olympic discipline of archery. Now she takes aim at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. Gauvin took a step closer to Tokyo at the second stage of the U.S. Olympic Team Trials for Archery earlier this fall in College Station, Texas.

Gauvin finished in the top five on the final day at College Station as USA Archery whittled its field of 2020 Olympic hopefuls from around 200 to 16 women and 16 men, and goes into the third stage in April in 10th place.

In addition to having her own success on the field, Gauvin hopes to help lift U.S. women into loftiness on the international archery scene.

“My primary goal is to make the Olympics, sure,” Gauvin said at the trials. “But I want to help push all of our women to be better.”

Gauvin took the challenge from her husband to shoot her first arrow when she was 28. She had no previous training in the sport — not at summer camps, not at a physical education class or even through friends.

Now at 35, she hopes to become an Olympian. She recalls sitting at home three years ago and emotionally watched the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games Rio 2016 and then saw American Ginny Thrasher win a gold medal in shooting. When it came to archery, she had to look away.

“Seeing all the people there and having to sit at home and watch it was just too emotional for me,” Gauvin said. “I saw a little bit of archery, but actually had to turn it off.”

Now she’s hoping to turn it on when it comes to revving up her game in the next two stages of Olympic trials.

Gauvin trains at her home in Connecticut, where she has a spacious backyard and little wind variance. She lives within an hour from Thomas Stanwood, who also shot his way into the final 16 of trials. Stanwood often makes the trip from Boston to train with Gauvin.

“It’s a nice setup, and there’s hardly any wind there,” Stanwood said.

Gauvin actually beat Stanwood in a friendly dual match, which gives her confidence moving toward her goal of Tokyo next year.

“I figured that if I can hang with Tom, I can beat any female shooter in the world,” Gauvin said.

The good side of having a range in her backyard is unlimited practice with no outside noise or interruptions. But a downside is also having no outside distraction. Not having close access to a facility like the Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center in California, where many archers train, means working alone. There are no coaches, nor any immediate competitors to her left or right when she’s shooting.

“If there’s something I really need to work on, it’s shooting with other people beside me,” Gauvin said. “In recurve, you see what everybody’s shooting, and you can hear so much going on around you. I don’t get that when I train at home.”

When Gauvin is not busy on the archery range, she is tied down with her work as an economist in the forest product industry. Gauvin said she analyzes data on everything to do with trees, from the time they go from a forest to the mills, and to their final destination, whether it be a cabinet in a kitchen, shelves in a library or building a house. She studies market trends and potential impacts through trade.

Originally on teamusa.org. Written by Scott McDonald is a writer from Houston who has covered sports for various outlets since 1998. He is a freelance contributor to TeamUSA.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.