“But the only similarity is that we both looked awful!” “It’s all anyone wanted to talk about in Rio,” Ellison laughed about his sudden fame outside the insular world of archery. He’s often bearded, leading to a viral meme at the Rio Games that compared him to Leonardo DiCaprio’s frontiersman in the 2015 film The Revenant. When he first hit the global scene at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, he was as a rough-and-ready teenager more comfortable in an old cowboy hat than the Ralph Lauren designer gear handed out to Team USA that year. It’s why early nicknames like ‘The Arizona Cowboy’ and the ‘Prospector’ stuck to him. The area’s virtues of humility and self-sufficiency are alive in Ellison. His roots go eight generations deep in the wilds of the U.S.’ vast West. He lives just up the road from the Ellison Family Farm, run by his father, Alfred. The next year, in 2019, he won a world title and returned to the world number-one spot for the first time since 2013 – the year after he won a team silver at the London Olympic Games. Three days after his experimental treatment, he fired off more arrows in a single day than he had in three years. This is a man who believes in solid principles. And I haven’t had any pain since.” Top of the heap with roots sunk deep “But he just puts his hands on you and heals you with his body energy. “It’s gonna sound crazy,” said Ellison, who’s had his share of physical challenges in life including a serious thyroid condition and a bout with Perthes disease as a child that landed him in leg braces for more than a year. “I’ve never met this guy before and before he even starts treating me, knowing nothing about my situation, he’s saying ‘you have a problem in your right hand and you have something wrong with your Achilles,’ and I’m just looking at the guy and he’s right. “Before I met Toja there’s absolutely no way in hell I would have considered seeing a bio-energetist,” said Ellison, a man whose reliance on no-frills, common-sense solutions fairly oozes from him. His wife of five years, Toja – a world top-ten compound-bow archer who competes for Slovenia – came up with an unusual option to treat an injury that had stumped doctors and threatened her husband’s career. He welcomed a son, Ty Cooper Ellison, to the world in the tough times of the COVID-19 pandemic, when worldwide archery competitions were cancelled and much of the prize money he relies on went off the table. It’s through family that Ellison finds strength. “I would have done anything to provide for the family.” “I wouldn’t have been picky,” he said with a shrug. It’s what led the archer to consider retiring from the sport and heading into the dangerous depths of the local copper mines that surround his home around the Pinal Mountains of central Arizona. He craves a performance as close to perfection as physics and general reality will allow.

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