Fairfield’s Paralympian

Matt Stutzman has been getting a lot of airtime recently.

In June, he was on the game show 'To Tell The Truth.” Sunday he was featured on a CBS Sunday Morning segment.

And now he is one of the athletes featured in the Netflix documentary 'Rising Phoenix,” which will debut Wednesday on the streaming service.

The documentary is about the Paralympics, an Olympic event every four years for disabled people, which Stutzman has competed in twice, in 2012 and 2016. Stutzman, a Fairfield resident whose nickname is 'the armless archer,” was born without arms, but took up archery 11 years ago as a means of putting food on the table.

He bagged his first deer that year.

Stutzman holds his bow with one leg, pulls back the string with his shoulder, and releases it with his mouth. He has become one of the most accomplished archers in the world, winning a silver medal at the 2012 Paralympic Games and setting a Guinness World Record in 2015 for longest accurate archery shot at 310 yards.

It's no surprise, then, that Netflix wanted to feature him in its documentary about Paralympians. In the film, Stutzman gets to tell his life story, how he entered archery, and how his accomplishments fit into a global understanding of disability and excellence.

He appears throughout the film and estimates that he's featured in 20-30 minutes of the documentary's hour and 46-minute run time.

The documentary traces the history of the Paralympic Games, from its creation by Sir Ludwig Guttmann in 1948. Guttmann organized a sports competition involving World War II veterans with spinal cord injuries.

Today, the Paralympics are the third largest sporting event in the world.

In addition to Stutzman, other athletes who are profiled include swimmers, runners, cyclists, basketball players and fencers who are missing limbs or have a similarly major disability and yet are performing at the highest levels in their sport. The release of the documentary was meant to coincide with the 2020 Tokyo Games, but those have been postponed to 2021 because of the coronavirus.

Stutzman said he was thrilled when he got the call from Netflix to be a part of the documentary.

'It gave me a chance to be a part of something a lot bigger, something amazing,” he said. 'The documentary tells my story in a way that also tells a bunch of other stories. We hope it changes the perception of people with disabilities, not just in sports but in regular life, that ‘they can do everything we can do.'”

A Netflix film crew spent a few days with Stutzman in 2019, getting footage of him around the house and practicing his archery. Stutzman said he had to keep the whole thing quiet from his friends. He couldn't tell them he was being interviewed for a Netflix documentary until the company announced it.

He had the same experience when he appeared on the ABC game show 'To Tell the Truth” in June. The show was filmed last year, but he couldn't tell anyone the outcome of the show until it aired.

'Rising Phoenix” is not the first time Stutzman has been on Netflix. He was one of the subjects of a 2011 documentary called 'My way to Olympia” about his and other disabled athletes' quest to compete in the 2012 London Paralympic Games.

Though 'Rising Phoenix” premiers Wednesday, Stutzman is inviting his fans to participate in a global watch party from 2-4 p.m. Saturday. He will be posting to his pages on Twitter and Facebook during that time as he provides context to the clips in the documentary.