A spinal injury ended Adriana Ruano’s chances of competing at the Olympics as a gymnast. She came back as a shooter and won Guatemala’s first gold medal on Wednesday.

Ruano was training for the 2011 world championships in gymnastics, a qualifier for the London Olympics the following year, when she felt pain in her back.

Scans showed she had six damaged vertebrae — a career-ending injury at age 16 — and she spent a year recovering, wearing a brace. Ruano’s doctor recommended she take up shooting if she wanted to stay in sports without aggravating her injured back.

“When I had my injury, I didn’t have anything. I started to get desperate, and I was frustrated. Then the door opened for me with this sport,” Ruano said.

More than a decade after Ruano swapped the balance beam and vault for a shotgun, her doctor’s advice paid off Wednesday when she won the women’s trap with an Olympic-record score of 45 out of 50.

Ruano closed her eyes and took a deep breath before hitting her 43rd target to make sure Italian silver medalist Silvana Stanco couldn’t catch her for the gold. She missed her next two shots after that, but it didn’t matter.

It was a stint volunteering at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro that put her on the path back to elite-level sports.

“I said to myself, ‘If I can’t be there as an athlete, maybe I can be there as a volunteer’, so I applied,” she said. “They put me on shooting, and I was able to watch my teammates. I could see the competition, and that was the moment that inspired me to think, ‘OK, maybe if not in gymnastics, I can do it in shooting.’”

Ruano placed 26th at the last Olympics in Tokyo, shortly after her father had died. Coming into Paris, though, she was the defending Pan-American Games champion.

Now she has given her country an Olympic gold medal, a day after Jean Pierre Brol won bronze in the men’s trap to claim Guatemala’s first medal since race walker Erick Barrondo’s silver at the 2012 London Olympics.

Results not the focus for Ukranian divers

Kseniia Bailo and Sofiia Lyskun finished second-to-last in women’s synchronized 10-meter platform diving and 74 points behind the winning pair from China — but the result really didn’t matter to the Ukrainian women.

Bailo, 19, told The AP she dedicated Wednesday’s performance to everyone fighting to protect her war-torn homeland.

“I’m happy to be in the Olympics because I compete today for my country, for soldiers and for athletes and coaches who died in war. I’m really proud of me,” she said. “It’s really difficult, it’s really hard because emotionally, I’m in the Ukraine. I can’t just live in Paris right now and don’t think about war, because my family is there, my friends are there. I need to compete for them.”

Bailo and Lyskun, 22, received warm cheers all morning. They scored a 285.00, ahead of the eighth-place French pair and 2.52 points behind Americans Jessica Parratto and Delaney Schnell in sixth.

Soccer legend Marta given red card

Marta was sent off after being red carded in Brazil’s Olympic group finale against Spain on Wednesday.

The legendary Brazilian captain walked off the field in Bordeaux in tears after she was shown the straight red for a tackle on Spain’s Olga Carmona in first-half stoppage time.

Marta, a six-time women’s world player of the year, was playing in her sixth Olympics. The 38-year-old star has said this will be her last major tournament with the national women’s soccer team.

Brazil was playing for a spot in the quarterfinals in France.

Despite all her accolades, Marta has never won an Olympic or Women’s World Cup title with Brazil. The team went close twice, winning silver medals in 2004 and 2008.

Better known just by her first name, Marta Vieira da Silva has scored a record 119 goals in 200 international appearances with Brazil. She has 13 Olympic goals, one away from matching fellow Brazilian Cristiane’s record.

Hassan to run 5K, 10K and marathon

Attempting to defend her 5,000- and 10,000-meter titles at the Olympics isn’t enough for Ethiopian-born Dutch runner Sifan Hassan. She also will push herself in the ultimate test of endurance, adding the marathon to her program at the Paris Games.

“I can’t tell you I’m going to get the gold medal in every event,” Hassan said Wednesday. “It is very hard.”

Hassan’s program will look like this:

• 5,000 heats on Friday; final on Monday.

• 10,000 on Friday, Aug. 9.

• Marathon on Sunday, Aug. 11.

In all, she’ll compete over a whopping 62 kilometers (38.6 miles) — nearly far enough to run from Paris to Versailles and back twice. And she’ll have roughly only 35 hours between the end of the 10,000 and the marathon.

“I’m curious what is going to happen,” Hassan said. “My biggest goal is to finish the event(s). And how I’m going to recover.”

Hassan could have run a fourth event, having earned bronze in the 1,500 in Tokyo.

But now she can match Emil Zatopek’s exploit from 1952, when the Czech runner swept the 5,000, 10,000 and the marathon at the Helsinki Games.

Jamaican sprinter pulls out of 100m

Jamaican Shericka Jackson will not run in the 100 meters when Olympic track starts on Friday, saying that the injury she suffered at a tuneup race earlier this month played a part in the decision. Jackson had been listed as the second favorite behind world champion Sha’Carri Richardson.

Jackson said she will still run the 200 meters. She is the only woman other than the world-record holder, the late Florence Griffith Joyner, to finish in under 21.5 seconds.