Tracie Lehuanani Ruiz-Conforto, widely known in competition as Tracie Ruiz

Tracie Lehuanani Ruiz-Conforto was born on February 4, 1963, in Honolulu, Hawaii, and grew up in the Seattle area. She entered Charlotte Davis's training system as a child and was paired with Candie Costie in a partnership that developed through years of conditioning, figures, musical interpretation, and matched duet movement. The two trained together as a sustained team rather than being assembled only for Olympic competition.

Ruiz became a dominant soloist as well as a duet swimmer. The International Swimming Hall of Fame credits her with 41 gold medals across a sixteen-year competitive career spanning 1973 to 1988. In 1982, she won World Championship titles in solo and figures, establishing international authority before synchronized swimming joined the Olympic program.

At the 1984 Los Angeles Games, the first Olympics to include synchronized swimming, Ruiz won the solo event and, with Costie, the duet gold. These were separate choreographic demands: solo competition foregrounded individual line, difficulty, and presentation, while duet required near-identical timing and spatial relation despite continuous underwater propulsion. She also won Pan American solo and duet gold in 1983, and returned to elite competition to win another Pan American solo title in 1987.

Ruiz qualified for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, where she won the solo silver medal behind Canadian Carolyn Waldo. The International Swimming Hall of Fame inducted her in 1993. Her career coincided with the transformation of synchronized swimming from an established but non-Olympic discipline into a highly visible global event, with her performances, partnership with Costie, and coaching relationship with Davis central to that transition.