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Dream is over, but Olympics 'not about the medals'

By DEBI RUHL 8/26/04
Herald-Tribune staff

Christine Nordhagen's Olympic dream ended early Sunday morning but the Canadian and world wrestling champion can still look back on her brilliant career with an enormous amount of perspective.

However, the 33-year-old pride of Valhalla Centre just didn't know she would find it in front of a worldwide audience of millions.

Results aside, when Nordhagen entered the opening ceremonies at the Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, just over a week ago, she knew she was there for more than Olympic gold.

"I realized what it was all about. I really felt a lot of pressure and stress before I got here," she said on the phone from Athens. "Once I was actually here, it was like the weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders.

"It's not about the medals. The Olympics is about athletes coming together to compete. It's about sportsmanship, fair play and giving it your best shot. The opening ceremonies opened my eyes to that.

"During training, it was all about me in my own little world. I was losing perspective. There are 266 other (Canadian) athletes here. My performance isn't the only one."

By opening the round robin with a loss to China's Wang Xu on Sunday, Nordhagen's medal chances were gone in an instant.

In her later match Sunday, Nordhagen defeated Italy's Katarzyna Juszczak. After a win over American Toccara Montgomery this morning, the best she can hope for is a fifth-place finish.

"The margin between a win and a loss is so small," she said. "It's not the end of the world. Life goes on and I realize I'm lucky to be here."

Nordhagen is a six-time world and 10-time national women's freestyle wrestling champion and is the most decorated athlete in the history of her sport, which is being contested on the Olympic stage for the very first time.

A teacher at Ernest Manning high school in Calgary, she has been wrestling for 12 years and considered retirement after being sidelined by a knee injury in 2002-03. Even without an Olympic medal, she plans on competing for one more year and hopes to finish on top at the next world championships.

"I know that I've won the worlds six times and I have the ability to be the best," she said.

Nordhagen's journey to the Olympic stage has not been without an outpouring of support from family, friends and even random strangers.

"I can't even describe it. It's absolutely overwhelming, but in a good way," she said, noting her parents Norman and Lillian, husband and coach Leigh Vierling and many family members made the trek to Greece to watch her compete.

"There has been so much great support from my family and from people visiting my website. Most people don't get an opportunity to hear great things like that about themselves so that was good for my confidence."

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Wrestlers foster women's cause

By JOHN ROMANO, Times Sports Columnist
Published August 23, 2004

ATHENS - Time should not be the ultimate factor in the success or failure of a cause. Instead, a movement should be measured in its converts.

In the skeptics who become believers. In the doubters who come to understand the call. In a 60-year-old physician, and father of four, rising to his feet to cheer at a women's wrestling match.

The Summer Games became more diverse Sunday morning. They also became more rowdy, bloody and sweaty, and that's not such a bad thing.

Women's wrestling made its Olympic debut at precisely 9:30 a.m. The official results will say it started on time, although you certainly could argue it is late by any number of centuries.

Go back to the Ancient Games in Greece where women were not just forbidden to compete, but to watch. Violators occasionally were tossed from cliffs.

Go back to the modern birth of the Olympics in 1896 in Athens, when women's sports had little room in this world.

Go back a month or so when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced the U.S. women's team with some lame remark about nude wrestling.

So understand, this will not catch on quickly. It's a lot of bodies shy of phenomenon and a few devotees short of cult. On Sunday, the stands were half empty and so was the locker room. There are only four weight classes and no method for seeding, so two of the best heavyweights met in the first round.

Still, it is a start. A point of entry. Mostly it is a cause, disguised as a competition.

"So many young girls can see now that it's really a legitimate sport and see it as a possibility," said Alaska native Tela O'Donnell, who failed to advance after losing her second match. "There are lots of avenues to learn from in life, but I've gained so much from wrestling.

"If seeing wrestling at the Olympics gives that opportunity to other girls, I think it would be so neat."

It will be a process. Of that there is no doubt. The idea of girls with bruises, mat burns and blood dripping down their faces is not easy to accept. Just ask the physician sitting in the middle of the Ano Liossia Hall.

Jose Miranda was not necessarily alarmed when his daughter Patricia came to him as an eighth-grader and said she was going out for the boys wrestling team. His children always had one flaky idea or another, and usually they were forgotten as easily as the previous page of a calendar.

But this one did not go away. Patricia continued to show up at wrestling practice, and Jose began to get concerned.

"She'd come home," he said, "with boo-boos on her face."

Jose, who fled Brazil in 1970 to escape a military dictatorship, did not come to California so his daughter could be abused in the name of sport.

They argued. He forbade her from attending meets. There is a story of Patricia showing up to wrestle at a tournament and finding her father had beaten her there and withdrawn her name. Jose says the story is not true. Patricia suggests her father might have a faulty memory.

"Most of the time, he would just show up and take me home," said Patricia, whose mother passed away when she was 10. "He didn't want to mess with officials. It was usually a battle between the two of us."

Jose finally caught a break when Patricia developed a back problem. He took her to a doctor, expecting to be told she should give up wrestling.

"The doctor was from Iran and wrestling is like soccer there. They love wrestling," Jose said, chuckling at the memory. "He was excited when he found out Patricia was a wrestler."

Eventually, Jose hatched a new plan. Patricia always had been a bright girl, but she never applied herself in school. If she got straight A's, he said, she would be allowed to wrestle in high school.

"I didn't have anything better to offer her," he said. "She wanted to wrestle."

Patricia graduated from high school with a 4.0 grade-point average and was named one of the captains of the boys wrestling team by her senior year.

She went on to Stanford where she earned degrees in economics and international policy. She continued to wrestle, but the gap in strength between her and her male competitors was becoming extreme.

Miranda would go weeks in practice without scoring a point. She finally made the Stanford varsity team as a senior and won three matches - a forfeit, a victory against another woman and against a junior college man.

Accepted at Yale law school, she put off school for one year to train for the Olympics. She is scheduled to start classes a week from today.

In the meantime, Miranda won all three of her matches Sunday and advanced to today's semifinal.

Watching from the lower level of the bleachers was her father, sister, two brothers and stepmother. So how does Dr. Miranda feel about wrestling today?

He still doesn't understand the sport. He's more interested in her upcoming enrollment at Yale. And he's still worried about the boo-boos.

But he's come to realize wrestling has helped make his daughter the person she is today. And, for that, he is grateful.

"What this Olympics means for girls is possibility," Jose Miranda said. "It's important for girls that they know they can do whatever they want, if they put their minds to it."

Even if their dads are inclined to resist.

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Which sports are Olympics-worthy?
Games: The bowlers want in and so do the chess kings, but the field is already crowded

By Mike Gorrell 8/23/04
The Salt Lake Tribune

ATHENS, Greece - Pierre de Coubertin would have loved triathlon.
Then-IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch emphasized that point by quoting the founder of the modern Games when triathlon was approved as an Olympic sport in 1994. "We need a sport that combines swimming, cycling and running, which are all so popular," Coubertin had said nearly a century earlier, "a modern, dynamic sport to celebrate the Olympic spirit of fair play, endurance, force, ability and passion."
His statement touches on attributes of most every sport that now is, once was or someday hopes to be part of the Olympic program. But on a global scale, with so many sports wanting to be part of an extravaganza already too big for most cities to handle, the struggle to gain acceptance usually results in questions being raised about the worthiness of competitors' claims.
Some purists feel all team sports should be ruled out.
For those who believe a true sport involves only actions that can be measured or timed, or leave just one person standing in the end, there is little room for competitions subjectively decided by judges.
But as Sara McMann, a U.S. athlete in wrestling - whose place in the Olympics is beyond question because of its history as one of the five original sports of the ancient Games - observed: "Almost every sport has a referee who determines if something is a point or not."
Wrestling included.
And, she added, "Gymnastics involves judgments, but everyone would agree it's athletic," a legitimate sport. What's not, then? "It can't be somebody making up a game and nobody else playing it. It has to be a physical activity, a skill you can refine and is openly competitive."
A few sports are easy to knock - such as badminton - because you can play them in your back yard. That would make them games rather than sports. But apply Coubertin's or McMann's definitions to a U.S. Olympic Committee description of badminton, and its place in the Games seems more than justifiable:
"Elite badminton athletes compete in a lightning-fast sport which demands constant, highly concentrated action: running, jumping, twisting, stretching, running backwards, throwing and striking. Besides explosiveness, quick reflexes and exceptional hand-eye coordination, elite competitors must
also possess superb aerobic endurance. In a typical match they cover nearly every inch of the court and can travel several miles in the process."
The Summer Olympic sports whose merits are most vulnerable to criticism are synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics. Sport or dance?
No doubt, the dance element looms large, lending credence to any argument that it is more of an art form than a sport.
But compare this training regime for synchronized swimming to that of a track star and the separation of the two realms is blurred.
"The U.S. Team swims nearly eight hours daily, six days a week, and spends an additional two hours daily cross training, lifting weights or land-drilling," according to the Synchro Swimming USA brochure.
IOC officials have criteria to determine what sports are eligible for the Games. They must be run by a formal international federation, adhere to international doping policies, have a history of world championships and have participation in a sizable number of countries around the globe.
That last clause causes problems for baseball, which Americans unquestionably consider a sport, but which could lose its place in the Games because so few countries play it. Same with golf, which would love to get in but has not, mainly because the Olympics are already too big.
But the Olympic agenda is not static. And that keeps up the hopes of advocates of nearly two dozen candidates in waiting, everything from water skiing and bowling to mountaineering, chess and bridge.
It also keeps current participants on their toes to make sure they maintain their spots and don't suffer the fate of tug of war, dropped after the 1920 Antwerp Games, or two pretty popular sports these days - rugby and lacrosse.

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Women grapple for attention as they make debut on wrestling mat

By John Niyo / The Detroit News 8/22/04

ATHENS, Greece--Long ago, the novelty wore off for these U.S. women’s wrestlers, the ones whose sport makes its Olympic debut beginning today in Athens.

Their greatest hope is that, four years from now, the same will be true for the rest of us.

Remember this if you’re channel surfing today and you find yourself watching something you’ve never seen before: Women wrestling, and not something part of some silly, misogynistic Vince McMahon production.

This is their chance. And ours, too.

“Athens is our stage to say, ‘Hey, look at us. Look at us as more than a sideshow or to think about us mud wrestling,’” said U.S. star Patricia Miranda, a 5-foot, 103-pound dynamo who also happens to be a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Stanford. She put off Yale Law School for this chance.

“Look at us and see our sweat, see our tears, see the triumph that is sport. It’s as intense as any male sport.”

If not more so, considering what they’ve been through, as pioneers in a sport that’s as old as sport itself — and old-school, too.

There are four women on the U.S. team in Athens, and they’re top medal contenders at all four of the weight classes.

Each of the Americans has a remarkable story to tell about getting from there to here, from petitioning school boards for the right to compete to pinning the opposite sex when it came time to prove they belonged — again and again.

Miranda, the daughter of a Brazilian-born doctor and social activist, first had to convince her father sports wouldn’t interfere with academics. Then she had to endure the taunts when, as the only girl on a boys high school team, she was named captain.

Sara McMann, a 138-pound world silver medalist, still hears those taunts, and some of them, she said, even come from members of the U.S. men’s team.

“Everyone will act normal to your face, but later it’ll be an elbow nudge, ‘Ha-ha-ha. Girl wrestling. What a joke,’” said McMann, who followed her brothers into the sport in wrestling-mad Lock Haven, Pa. Townsend Saunders, a former U.S. Olympic wrestler and one of the coaches of the women’s team, compared these women’s struggle to that of Jackie Robinson in baseball. Saunders, an African-American, should know: He’s married to the former Tricia McNaughton, an Ann Arbor native whose pioneering efforts in the sport — for more than two decades — helped make today possible. A four-time world champion, she wrestled until she was 35 hoping to get a chance at the Olympics, but it never came.

“I lived with her for 15 years,” Townsend said. “I would be there when she’d come home crying because some athletic director or some coach or official wouldn’t let her compete.

“And it still goes on. We’re here at the Olympics, but back home people are saying this is wrong — morally wrong.”

Tricia Saunders, 38, who is a U.S. assistant, nods her head sadly.

“I still don’t get it,” she said.

Hopefully, after this weekend, more of us will.

“It’s not that every woman has to wrestle, or that every girl should,” Miranda said. “It’s that every girl in America can know she can.”

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Wrestler's silver `took a long time'
Dedication helped beat a losing streak
Overcame objections of male opponents

DAVE FESCHUK 8/24/04
SPORTS COLUMNIST

KEN FAUGHT/TORONTO STAR Canadian freestyle wrestler Tonya Verbeek, 27, of Beamsville, Ont., is all smiles after winning silver yesterday. It was the first Olympics to feature women’s freestyle wrestling.

It was more than 10 years ago when Tonya Verbeek fell in love with wrestling. But in the beginning it wouldn't love her back.

She was a 16-year-old athlete with a raft of sporting identities, a gymnast and a competitive rope-skipper, a volleyball player and a basketball ace. But when Beamsville High School started a girls' wrestling team, her heart was somehow stolen by an ancient sport once practised by dangerous naked men at the first Olympics.

Yesterday, some 28 centuries since those games, Verbeek won a silver medal at the first Olympics to feature women's freestyle wrestling. It was Canada's fifth medal of the Athens Games and may be a harbinger of more to come. Pickering's Perdita Felicien goes for gold today as a heavy favourite in the 100-metre hurdles (3:30 p.m. EDT).

Verbeek's medal was the highlight of a day that also included disappointment for Canada: Gymnast Kyle Shewfelt, winner of the country's only gold medal, narrowly lost out on a bronze in the men's vault to a Romanian rival who stumbled off the landing mat on the final attempt of the competition. Canada protested his scores, claiming they were "mathematically impossible," but the initial complaint was rejected.

Rejection is something Verbeek, 27, knows about, too. Her performance yesterday prompted her coach to think back to the mid-1990s, when the girl who would turn out to be one of his star pupils became the first female to enter an all-male domain known as the Niagara Wrestling Club. Verbeek walked into the club's workout room at Brock University in St. Catharines and, if she had been a more demure neophyte, the sights and sounds might have shocked her. She stood in a gym full of sweaty, stinky brutes, all muscles and machismo. And if they weren't saying much, she should have heard what they were thinking.

"I know I didn't like it — nobody was happy about it," said Marty Calder, the coach who back in 1993 was training at Brock between his two career trips to the Olympics as a competitor. "I was a guy's guy, a member of the he-man woman haters' club, as far as wrestling was concerned. Then all of a sudden a woman comes in and it's something that maybe we didn't accept because of our bullheadedness."

Calder laughed, his bullhead since replaced with a smiling face: "But that's long gone now."

The attitude is long gone because Verbeek almost immediately won over the chauvinists with her no-rest work ethic and her take-on-all-comers toughness. But still others needed convincing.

"We tried to talk her out of (wrestling)," remembered Jerry Verbeek, her father.

But Tonya was stubborn, and all through her undefeated high school career — during which she represented Canada in the world championships as an 18 year old — she was also without peer. Out of necessity she often wrestled with her Beamsville coach, David Collie, which was problematic only because he outweighed her by about 100 pounds.

"For her, grabbing one of my legs was like grabbing two of her opponent's," said Collie yesterday over the phone from his home in Fonthill, Ont. "I just had to be careful not to crush her."

The hazards were large and small. Wrestling, as Canada's six-time world champion Christine Nordhagen was saying yesterday, "is bad for your hair." Competitors have to work to keep their locks out of the way; they braid them and wrap them in elastics and simply chop them short. Anyone with an ounce of vanity would gasp at the sport's other disfiguring possibilities. Inevitable head butts break noses. And the constant banging of skulls produces cauliflower ears, a puffy build-up of dried blood and tissue that, once incurred, can only be reversed with cosmetic surgery.

Verbeek, like every world-class wrestler, has accepted the risks even while the sport has dealt her its share of cutting blows. After all her early success, she spent much of the past decade being surpassed by a couple of Canadian rivals. Her chief nemeses, national team members Jenn Ryz and Erica Sharp, beat her so consistently in crucial matches that all the promise of Verbeek's 1995 world championship berth was in danger of being forgotten.

"Definitely I thought I was going to (quit)," said Verbeek. "I thought, `It's not happening for me so why am I bothering.' It was really because I wasn't training as hard and committing myself. It was all or nothing. I had to decide."

She opted for full commitment — three-a-day workouts — but the results didn't follow immediately. There were more losses and a few wins. The turning point didn't come until February, when she reversed the trend and beat Sharp (once) and Ryz (twice) to win the Olympic trials.

"I did it! I did it!" Calder remembered her hollering. "It took me a long time," Verbeek said. "But it was worth it."

It was worth it yesterday when she stood on the podium and waved to her parents, her mother Kathy shedding tears, her father trying to hold them back. It was worth it when she finally hugged her folks, her mother offering a smooch and the words, "My little Tonya," her father getting his first touch of her medal and saying, "Can I keep this for a while?"

The Olympics has never been the vanguard of sex equity. Women didn't play basketball in the Games until 1976. They didn't run the marathon until 1984.

On a day when everybody wanted to give her credit as a pioneer, meanwhile, Verbeek seemed as though she wanted nothing more than to spread it around.

"There are so many people who are a part of this and I happen to be the one that stepped on the mat today representing us," Verbeek said. "Those other girls out there ... so many from our country work so hard, and maybe they didn't have a medal match, but we're an awesome group."

"A lot of people don't even know there's women's wrestling out there ... For the girls out there — anything's possible. We've been waiting (to be admitted to the Olympics) and now that it's here, there's more to come."

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Montgomery looking for gold, respect for sport
Cumberland College student on mat today

By BRIAN BENNETT 8/22/04

bbennett@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

ATHENS — Toccara Montgomery's road to a possible Olympic medal in women's wrestling got a lot tougher yesterday.

The Cumberland College student drew her top rival and possibly the world's best female wrestler, Japan's Kyoko Hamaguchi, for her first match in the 159-pound weight class today. Only one will emerge into tonight's semifinals.

But the draw didn't faze Montgomery, who like most U.S. women wrestlers is used to overcoming obstacles.

"I'm really confident in my training, and I feel really strong," she said. "My money's on me."

The Olympics have featured wrestling since Zeus was in diapers, but until now only men could compete. Montgomery and her teammates aim to end all jokes about women wrestling in mud or hot oil.

"This is going to give the sport the recognition it needs and deserves," she said. "So many people don't know anything about women's wrestling."

The 21-year-old from Cleveland didn't know much about wrestling, either, when she took it up as a sophomore in high school. She heard an announcement at school about tryouts and thought it might help her yearbook resume.

"I was trying to get `Most Athletic,' and I needed another sport," said Montgomery, who also played basketball, volleyball and softball.

Not everyone thought this girl who was losing to boys should have been wrestling, and she used that as motivation to keep going.

"I was a teenage girl, so if I had people telling me no, of course I was going to do the opposite," she said.

Wrestling also provided her an outlet to grapple with a personal tragedy. The same year of her first match, her father, Paul, was convicted of double homicide for shooting two drug dealers. He's serving a life sentence in an Ohio prison.

Montgomery doesn't like to talk about what happened — "that chapter is closed," she said. But she remains close to her father. She visited him four days before leaving for Athens. Paul urged her on but joked he still could whip her.

"Our relationship is very supportive," she said. "I've always been a daddy's girl, and I still am."

Kip Flanik, her coach at Cumberland, is her other father figure. He also coached her in high school, taking her to national tournaments where she could wrestle other top girls. They both moved on to Cumberland, which has one of only six U.S. varsity women's wrestling programs.

Montgomery has won silver medals at the past two world championships. She never really thought about the Olympics, though, until she became surprisingly emotional while watching the 2000 opening ceremonies. About a year later she found out that her sport had been added to the Athens Games.

Not everyone agreed with the decision. The men's wrestling program has lost six weight classes since the 1996 Games, partly because of the addition of women. The four U.S. women here say they have heard negative rumblings in the wrestling community about their inclusion.

"We still have a long way to go to gain respect," said Patricia Miranda, a contender in the 106-pound class. "But this is where it starts."

Montgomery's quest will begin today against Hamaguchi, a five-time world champ. Montgomery owns only one win over her, which came in a team World Cup event last year. Earlier this year Hamaguchi told Japanese newspapers, "I will definitely win the gold."

But U.S. women's coach Terry Steiner likes Montgomery's chances because of her confidence and ability to relax in pressure situations.

This likely could be her last shot on the big stage. Montgomery plans to retire after Athens to concentrate on finishing her education degree at Cumberland. Then she'd like to teach and possibly coach girls' wrestling.

She hopes these Olympics will create more girls who are interested in the sport.

"A lot of younger girls now have a goal to work for," she said. "To be able to say, `I want to be an Olympian' is an opportunity every athlete should have."

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ATHENS OLYMPICS 2004 / Japanese women pin 4 medals

Ken Marantz / Daily Yomiuri Sportswriter 8/25/04

Saori Yoshida's tumbling pass wouldn't win any gymnastics medals, but that's alright because she now has a gold in wrestling.

Yoshida's post-match display capped one of two golden performances for Japan, which came away with medals in all four weight classes in the inaugural Olympic women's wrestling tournament.

Yoshida won the 55-kilogram class gold, and was soon followed onto the top step of the Athens Olympics medal podium by Kaori Icho, who triumphed in the 63-kg division.

For Icho, the gold medal had a little less shine, coming as it did about an hour after older sister Chiharu Icho had to settle for a silver at 48 kg.

Kyoko Hamaguchi added the 72-kg bronze to Japan's ever-burgeoning haul of medals at the Athens Olympics.

Japan ended the day with 15 golds, one away from the record 16 won at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics with such high-level sports as baseball and synchronized swimming still to be completed.

The overall total of 32 equals the haul brought home from the 1984 Los Angeles Games, which was boycotted by the Soviet bloc.

Expectations were always high that the women's wrestlers would add their share to the medal count.

All four came to Athens as world champions, raising realistic hopes for a sweep of the golds at the Ano Liossia Olympic Hall.

They came close.

In a clash of reigning world champions, Chiharu Icho lost to Ukraine's Irini Merleni on criteria after their 48-kg title bout ended after nine minutes of regulation and extra time tied 2-2.

A warning issued to Icho for passivity became the margin of victory for Merleni, who was so overjoyed at being declared the winner that she leaped into the referee's arms.

Icho said her hesitance to be aggressive in the overtime period led to her downfall.

"My lack of courage turned a gold into silver," the 22-year-old Icho said.

Asked if there was any joy in a silver medal, Icho replied stoically, "The Olympics is only every four years and I don't know if I'll get to the next one. I'm not happy at all, I'm very dejected."

Merleni won the world gold in the 48-kg class last year in New York, while Icho took the 51-kg title.

The 51-kg class was eliminated when the weight classes were reduced from seven to four to accommodate women's wrestling in the Olympics.

Merleni said she was unaware that she was ahead on criteria.

"When the referee raised my arm, I was very surprised," she said. "The Olympics is the utmost peak. I didn't believe I was capable of succeeding. This is the most sacred thing in an athlete's life."

Merleni alternately cried, screeched, pumped her fists in elation, and also jumped into her coach's arms.

On the medal podium, Icho stood grim faced throughout as Merleni's tears flowed unabatedly.

By contrast, Yoshida's celebrations seemed subdued.

After whipping Canada's Tonya Verbeek 6-0, Yoshida gave coach Kazuhito Sakae a victory ride on her powerful shoulders, then topped it off with a cartwheel and back flip across the mat.

"I had planned to pick up my coach," Yoshida said. "I thought that if I still had any strength in my legs, I would do the flip."

Sakae has shouldered the burden of developing the three Japanese who made the finals. Yoshida and the Icho sisters wrestle for him at powerhouse Chukyo Women's University in Nagoya.

Yoshida, a three-time world champion who has never lost to a non-Japanese opponent in her career, extended her winning streak of international tournament titles to 16 straight.

Yoshida, 21, began wrestling at age 3, a likely path given that her father, Eikatsu, was the Japanese national champion at 57 kg in 1973. He had tried out for, but failed to make, the 1976 Olympic team.

Putting aside her sister's loss, Kaori Icho scored three second-period points off takedowns, the winning one with 22 seconds remaining, to edge longtime American rival Sara McCann 3-2 in the 63-kg final.

"When Chiharu lost, my mind went blank and I didn't know what was going on," said Icho, 20, unusually subdued for someone who had just won an Olympic gold. "She told me, 'Be brave and keep attacking.' That calmed me down."

It was a crushing defeat for McCann, who lost in overtime to Icho in the final at last year's world championships. Icho has won four of five meetings between the two.

Like Chiharu Icho, McCann was less than satisfied with the silver.

"I don't think there's anything more painful in the world," said McCann, who broke into tears on the medal podium and again at the press conference.

In the 72-kg bronze-medal match, Hamaguchi defeated Ukraine's Svitlana Sayenko 4-0.

As the four are all still young--Hamaguchi is the oldest at 26--prospects are good for a similar showing in Beijing in 2008.

Yoshida, for one, has already set her sights on defending her crown.

"It's four years from now," Yoshida said. "There will be world championships and other international tournaments, but my aim is for gold in Beijing."

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Singing praises of wrestling's heavy medal

By Christie Blatchford
Tuesday, August 24, 2004 - Page S2

ATHENS -- There is beauty in the oddest places, even at the Ano Liossia
Olympic Hall, the temporary heart of the land of cauliflower ears,
those ears by which, as wrestlers themselves will tell you, the rest of us
shall know them.

It was in the history here yesterday, where for the first time, women
-- an even dozen of them, including Beamsville, Ont.'s own Tonya Verbeek --
stood on a podium and received Olympic wrestling medals.

Verbeek's was a heavy silver one for the 55-kilogram class, and when
she showed it afterward to her parents, her dad, Jerry, whispered: "I'm
proud of you, honey. You deserve it," and her mom, Kathy, cried.

In the Western world, where in the main the fight for equality was long
ago waged and won, women breaking through the wrestling ceiling may seem a
dubious victory, or at least an insignificant one.

But it isn't.

It is never unimportant that another door swings open, and a child,
whether boy or girl, can find the right dream to chase, and surely it matters
that others can share in the joy of one of those dreams being fulfilled. And
maybe, too, as Martha Stewart used to say, even if it's a little thing,
it's a good thing whenever a person can make a fan of a skeptic, especially
if the skeptic is herself.

All of that was wrapped up in wrestling's big Olympic day, and in
Verbeek and her fellow first-time medalists.

She was at the top of her game in 1995, when she was 18 and the best
woman wrestler in Canada, but nothing came easily for her in the sport again.

In the years that followed, she would consistently fall short of making
the national team and was on wrestling's fringes. Even her route to Athens
was hard, with her failing to finish in the top in a world tournament the
first time she tried, and qualifying only with a desperate effort at a
second.

As her coach, Marty Calder, put it, "It wasn't as if she wasn't close"
all that time, but rather that she wasn't quite good enough, so she had the
additional torment peculiar to those on the second string.

She almost quit, in her second year of university, about six years ago.
"I thought I was going nowhere," she said. "I thought it wasn't happening
for me." But she thought it over -- she is a quiet, very still young woman
when not on the mat -- decided that she hadn't been sufficiently committed,
and gave herself over to it anew.

Knowing her struggle, the enormous perseverance she showed, Calder
called her silver-medal performance "phenomenal, under the circumstances. To
see her not give up, not give up on the training, for a person like that to
be rewarded, it's a nice setup, it's a nice situation."

When she first came home from Beamsville High School and announced she
was going to wrestle, her folks tried to talk her out of it.

By then, she was already a member of the Lincoln Leapers, one of the
Niagara area's accomplished "skippers" who did jump-rope tours to convince
youngsters of the benefits of exercise and who won a championship in
skipping, and her father was hoping against hope that wrestling would
be a passing fancy. What he actually said to her, he said, was, "Oh, come
on."

But his second youngest child was headstrong ("Still is," Jerry Verbeek
said) and she was then 16, so they knew they couldn't convince her it
was a silly idea. This was almost a decade ago, after all, and the very idea
of women wrestling was foreign. Even Calder, himself a two-time Olympian
who only retired four years ago, said he was of the "he-man" school, which
deemed wrestling a sport best left to men. "I changed my mind," he
said. "It takes time. But now I know it's as much a woman's sport as a man's:
They earned it."

As for Verbeek, that her path was rocky makes everything that has
happened to her here more delicious. Of the four Canadian women wrestlers, it
was her teammate Christine Nordhagen, a former world champion, whose name was
most often mentioned as the likely medal contender. But Nordhagen had a
miserably tough draw -- the wrestling draw is purely random, and she lost her
first match, eventually finishing fifth -- and it was Verbeek who went
through undefeated.

"It was really hard to make this dream," Verbeek said yesterday. "And I
like it that way. . . . I knew I worked my butt off to get here. I expect
the best of myself."

The challenges, she said, "have made me who I am as a person,
physically and intellectually." As Calder put it slyly, "It's the hungry cat who
catches the most mice," and Verbeek was still hungry even with the silver
around her neck. She was whupped in the gold-medal match by the fierce Japanese
wrestler Saori Yoshida, who is undefeated over the past two years and
who had to struggle to remember the lone occasion in practice when a fellow
Japanese beat her, but refused to pronounce Yoshida without weakness or
to acknowledge that she can't be beaten.

"There are some things I need to work on," Verbeek said in her
understated way. "I'm not totally satisfied with my performance. But I really did
give it my all, and I'm happy about that."

As for the history lesson for girls, she said, "Anything's possible.
We've been waiting for this. Now it's here. We have made our point being
here." The French bronze medalist, Anna Gomis, said something similar: "Go for
it. Wrestling isn't an easy sport . . . but obviously there's a public that
likes to see it. So, let's go."

But the point was perhaps best made by the Ukrainian woman, Irini
Merleni, who won the first gold medal of the day in the 48-kilogram class -- and
the first entry in the record books -- for women.

When the referee raised her right arm to signify she had won, Merleni
first grinned and yelped, then burst into tears, and then jumped right into
the arms of the startled official and wrapped her legs around him, removing
herself only after she kissed him. She then sobbed throughout the medal
presentation, kissing each and every person -- the medal presenter, the
wreath presenter -- who came anywhere near her. It was a display of
such spontaneous, unbridled delight that by itself it made the case: Of
course women should wrestle, if it makes them this happy to do it, and others
this happy to see it.

Christine Nordhagen started to wrestle because she was strong, and she
won, and she liked winning. The 21-year-old Yoshida was wrestling as a
three-year-old. Her father was a wrestler, she said. So was her
brother. "It was natural for me to wrestle, too."

And Tonya Verbeek went to a wrestling class in Grade 11 out of
curiosity, and got hooked.

Why do women wrestle? Same old reasons: Because it's there. Because
they can.

At the Dofasco plant in Hamilton, where her dad works as a shift
engineer, the lads should know that Jerry figures he could maybe take her, but
only if they wear hockey sweaters, and he can pull hers over her head.

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Japan body-slamming its way to super showing
The women wrestlers, in Games debut, contribute two gold medals

Straitstimes 8/27/04

THANKS to women's wrestling, Japan is now one gold shy of the nation's best Olympic gold-medal haul.

Japan has 15 golds - its most recent pair coming from wrestlers Saori Yoshida in 55kg class and Kaori Icho in 63kg class. Just one more victory in the Athens Games will match Japan's best effort in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

The Asian nation has 32 medals - 15 gold, eight silvers and nine bronze - after 10 days of competition.

Japan long ago surpassed its Athens goal of 10 golds and overall total of 25 medals.

Said Japanese Olympic Committee president Tsunekazu Takeda: 'Looking back at the first week of games, our traditional sports, such as gymnastics and swimming, have had a revival, and in judo, we have proved again that Japan is a leader.'

Japanese judokas picked up eight golds and two silvers and, thanks to the debut of women's wrestling at the Athens Games, Japan has two more golds, one silver and a bronze.

Yoshida, who like the rest of her peers had waited more than a century for their beloved sport to be included in the Olympic programme, made it abundantly clear that the wait was worth it.

She met her victory with unbridled joy, did back-handsprings on the mat and then got a victory ride on her coach's shoulders.

Irini Merleni of the Ukraine jumped into the referee's arms. China's Wang Xu skipped around the interior of Ano Liossia Olympic Hall with her national flag as if she were a five-year-old who had just been handed a balloon.

There is nothing quite like the first time, and this was not only the first time on sport's grandest stage for these women but the first time for any women in their sport.

It was a familiar scene for someone who has already attended coming-out parties over the years for women's pole vaulters, marathoners and ice hockey players.

But that made it no less moving to watch all that talent and missionary zeal in full motion and emotion.

'For me the Olympic Games is the utmost peak of a career for any athlete,' said Merleni, a tiny woman whose playful hairstyle - two short pig tails - was in perfect accord with her over-the-moon response to victory in the under 48-kg class.

Is there any good reason to keep tending a few remnants of the Olympic gate? To keep saying no out of habit when there are hard-working, hard-playing women perfectly willing and able to put their bodies on the line, to wince and protest as the blows and the bodies fall?

The answer has long seemed obvious: If they have the desire, let them fulfil it.

And the greatest compliment to risk-taking women like Merleni and the Icho sisters was that the curiosity factor was fleeting yesterday morning (Singapore time).

And it quickly became much more interesting to see who would win. IHT

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No jelly jokes, please

By Peter FitzSimons
August 24, 2004

Gripping action: women wrestle for the first time at an Olympic Games. Photo: Craig Golding

We are the women wrestlers, and we've already heard all your jokes, okay? And you better believe we're over them. We know you misogynist mongrels and raggedy rednecks equate female wrestling with mud and jelly wrestling; we've heard your sniggering about our lack of ability to go for the "Christmas grip", your snide remarks about the so-called "World Championship" female wrestlers you prefer, and here's your last warning: Enough Already. From this point on, we better be hearing a bit of respect, see, for we are now Olympians.

And they are, too. Despite the fact that Greco-Roman wrestling has, as you might imagine, been going on in these parts since Socrates first pinned Plato to the mat with a good'un, this time there really is something new under the Mediterranean sun.

In a land where there were no women competitors at the ancient Olympic Games, and no female spectators, it has now moved to the point where Athens has the honour of becoming the first Olympic Games to welcome women to the wrestling ring of rings.

Although the female version of the sport is still in its relative competitive infancy - in that wrestling strong-house of America, for example, there are some 3200 female wrestlers against 250,000 males - the standard of competition here is very good.

To judge by the nationalities appearing in these early rounds of the lower weight divisions, it is clear that the strongest countries are from North America, Northern Europe and Asia, with a smattering of representatives from elsewhere - although you can just about count on one finger how many Grecos or Romans are competing this morning. (Australia does not yet have a contestant in the female class, and has just one male competitor good enough to compete internationally.)

The sport has two rounds of three minutes each, with the referee awarding points for the degree of control one wrestler exerts over the other, although the match is over if one wrestler pins the other's shoulderblades to the mat.

But quiet now. Let's watch as, in the semi-finals of the under-55kg division, Ida-Theres Karlsson of Sweden takes on Tonya Verbeek of Canada. Karlsson is the blonde with the small tattoo on her shoulder, Verbeek the one with two ponytails, who looks like she means murder.

After the quick handshake, the referee blows his whistle and the two start pushing each other in the shoulders, looking for the right moment to get to grips. Now! Their heads come together, they hold and now, as they grapple, each is trying to get the other even slightly off-balance so they can try a throw.

As the crowd of some 4000 chants, it is the Canadian who gets the Swede down first, and positions her so she can't get up, still without being able to get her shoulders near the mat. One point is awarded.

Start again, and Karlsson soon returns the favour - 1-1.

Although evenly matched for most of the bout, with just 40 seconds to go, and the possibility of extra time looming, the Canadian wraps herself around the Swede like ivy, and it is surprising that Karlsson can even breathe, let alone move a muscle. Whistle. Two points awarded - 3-1 to the Canadian. Final siren. Bout over.

The two rise, shake hands, shake with the ref, and then he lifts Verbeek's hand high in victory. She is now through, with a chance for an Olympic gold. And that will help shut up the knockers at home.

And so it goes. Olympic female wrestling. Long may they grip, grapple and prosper.

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The pain isn't permanent

By Jim Litke
AP Tuesday, August 24, 2004

ATHENS, Greece (AP)-The brother who taught Sara McMann how to wrestle is gone. The trial of the man charged with his murder is scheduled this fall, soon after she makes her way home from the Olympics.

The sport she put her life on hold to pursue may disappear from the Summer Games almost as quickly as it arrived.

And there she sat with a silver medal around her neck, weeping so uncontrollably it would break your heart.

"I don’t think there’s anything more painful in the world," McMann said.

It’s sad how often you hear things like that from athletes who lose in the finals of sports that are making their Olympic debut. They are pioneers, fearless and overachievers by nature. They’ve sacrificed more, endured more pain and bottled up their emotions just to continue the long, difficult march to find a place to play. They don’t have to be told to act like ambassadors. They always know exactly what’s at stake. And maybe that’s why, the moment they finish a step short of the promised land, all that hurt comes spilling out.

"I just felt like I did everything I could, worked as hard as I could," McMann said, "and it just wasn’t good enough."

She is a bright, 23-year-old who will return from Athens and move from the U.S. Olympic Committee’s training facility in Colorado to Washington, D.C., with her boyfriend, former Arizona State wrestler Steven Blackford. He’s going to law school at Catholic University. She plans to pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology.

Stories like hers are all over women’s wrestling, just as they are in women’s hockey, soccer and softball. McMann’s teammate, Patricia Miranda, who won a bronze Monday night, got two degrees from Stanford and deferred her admission to Yale Law School for two years to be here.

"I don’t know," Miranda said, when asked about sticking around to wrestle in 2008 at Beijing-assuming the International Olympic Committee doesn’t yank the sport in an effort to streamline the games.

"Maybe I’ll be able to shake it out of my blood by then. Either way," she said, referring to law school, "I’m looking forward to the climb from the bottom of another mountain."

That is hardly an exaggeration. Both McMann and Miranda wrestled against boys most of their school careers, never complaining when teammates punished them in grueling practices for the incontrovertible sin of being a girl. Both eventually won the boys over, but the indignities never stopped there. Sometimes, opposing teams simply forfeited matches or faked injuries rather than wrestle them. Other times, those teams sent out boys who were a few years older and more skilled than any of their counterparts.

McMann went through her senior year of high school with a 15-13 mark against all-male competition, a tribute not just to a tireless work ethic, but the time her older brother, Jason, put in teaching Sara to love wrestling when they were kids.

Five years ago, Jason McMann was beaten unconscious, driven to a remote part of Clinton County, Pa., and left to die. Prosecutors there said the slaying was drug-related, and it shook the McMann family, perhaps Sara most of all. Her life rent by tragedy, wrestling became the vehicle that helped her move on.

"It only comforts me that my brother would have been proud of me either way," McMann said, her eyes swollen and red, matching the dried blood from a cut across the bridge of her nose.

Everybody who saw her defeated by reigning world champion Kaori Icho of Japan had to feel the same way. The two have trained together, fought each other a handful of times and this time, Icho strung together three consecutive takedowns, the final one with 23 seconds left, to score a 3-2 win in the 138 1/2-pound (63 kg) gold medal match.

"She’s my best rival," Icho said. "When our eyes meet, we smile, and sometimes it’s a bitter smile."

A half-hour earlier, Icho’s sister, Chihari, was beaten by Irina Merleni of the Ukraine in the final of the 105 1/2 (48 kg) class. She, too, came to the interview room and sat there, her features the definition of disconsolate.

Japan is a powerhouse in the emerging sport, but it wasn’t a failure to meet the expectations of a nation, or even of the packed crowd of mostly her countrymen, that left Chihari despondent. The pain was purely her own.

And when asked if she took any joy at all in winning the silver, she said through an interpreter: "The word ‘joy’ is not what I’m feeling. All I’m feeling is regret."

Miranda, who’d been beaten by Merleni earlier, sat at the end of the same table, a smile offsetting a large welt peaking out from the corner of her right eye. She understood better than anyone in the room exactly how Chihari felt. But Miranda also understood it was time to move on.

"I hope in time," she said softly, with a glance at Chihari, "that would change."

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Not how she planned it

MIRANDA SUCCUMBS TO HER RIVAL AGAIN, TAKES BRONZE MEDAL

By Elliott Almond

Mercury News 8/24/04

ATHENS, Greece - Patricia Miranda could not forget the match. A year ago the wrestler from Saratoga lost the world championship by a point to Irini Merleni of Ukraine. It was a defeat that crushed the leader of the women's wrestling movement in the United States.

Everything else Miranda had accomplished could not erase the pain.

She came to Athens thinking of nothing other than defeating Merleni and winning a gold medal in the sport's Olympic debut. The dream ended Monday in her semifinal match in the 48-kilogram class, when Merleni put Miranda on her back within 30 seconds on the way to a 9-0 victory.

``Twelve years of work; it's not very easy to take,'' Miranda's father, Jose, said from the stands at Ano Liossia Olympic Hall.

Miranda left the Olympic stage with a bronze after trouncing France's Angelique Berthenet 12-4. Sara McMann was the lone American woman to advance to a gold-medal match. She won the silver in the 63-kilogram division, behind Kaori Icho of Japan.

While sharing in a historic moment for women's wrestling, Miranda lamented her second loss to Merleni in three tries.

``You can't give up big points early,'' U.S. Coach Terry Steiner said. ``She kind of got taken out right away.''

The wrestler Miranda faced Monday had improved vastly since the last time they squared off. Merleni steamrolled four opponents by a combined score of 40-0 to reach the final, where she edged Chiharu Icho of Japan.

Miranda, 25, who competed on the Stanford men's team for five years, could not counterattack against Merleni, who is taller and more powerfully built.

``She won a lot of early matches out of sheer intimidation,'' Miranda said. ``But I didn't feel any fear out there.

``I probably tried to compensate too much. My basic nature is to go harder. Maybe it took a little more strategy.''

At the world championships last year in New York, Miranda took the 5-4 loss to Merleni so hard, she considered herself a failure. Her boyfriend, Levi Weikel-Magden, worried that she had put too much emphasis on that one match. Anything can happen in wrestling, he told her.

But Miranda has always pushed when she wanted something. When her father resisted her membership on the boys wrestling team at Saratoga High, she made a deal: If she got straight A's, he would have to let her compete. She did her part in the classroom and was allowed to wrestle.

Coming to Athens, Miranda did not want to repeat the experience from New York, where she felt as though she wrestled tentatively against Merleni. On the red-and-yellow mat, Miranda was aggressive to the end. With seconds left, she still thought she had a chance for a pin.

``I really didn't care if I lost, as long as I fought,'' Miranda said. ``I knew we were going to end up looking like Rocky afterward.''

Steiner knew how much losing the gold medal hurt her. But he said he hoped Miranda would appreciate the bronze in 10 years. He wanted her to remember everything that she had done as a pioneer in this fledgling sport.

Monday morning, Miranda repeated over and over that she was confused by her loss. The woman who has said she uses the sport as a way to find insight into herself did not know how to respond.

``I know it's a consolation prize,'' she said of going on to win the bronze. ``But I can say, Americans bounce back.''

-------------------------------------------

In women's wrestling debut, No. 1 downs No. 2

By MARK MALONEY 8/22/04
Lexington Herald-Leader (Lexington, Ky.)

ATHENS - Toccara Montgomery could have gone out with a fine whine.
Instead, she chose to go out like a fine wine.

Classy. Distinctive.

Montgomery, two-time World Championships silver-medalist, had the
toughest draw possible as women's wrestling made its Olympic debut Sunday in the
Athens Games: five-time world champion Kyoko Hamaguchi, a Japanese
legend who carried her country's flag during last week's Opening Ceremonies.

Simple luck of the draw. A blind draw. No seedings.

Hamaguchi, serenaded by a drum, bells other noisemakers and chants from
several hundred bandana-wearing, flag-waving Japanese fans, went out
and whipped Montgomery 8-4.

Just like that, the second-best wrestler in the world at 72 kilograms
(158 1/2 pounds) was drummed out of medal contention at Ano Liossia Olympic
Hall.

Only the winner of the three-woman pool would advance to the medal
round.

Hamaguchi sealed her pool victory by humbling Bulgaria's Stanka Zlateva
10-0.

Montgomery, out of the same Cleveland high school that produced track
and field legend Jesse Owens, came out sluggish against Zlateva. The
Bulgarian led 5-0 through one period, but Montgomery needed only a few seconds
after that to record a pin.

The best Montgomery can hope to finish Monday is fifth place.

Montgomery was asked about fixing the draw so that a No. 1 vs. No. 2
first-round match doesn't happen again. She declined to whine.

"I don't know. It would be kind of hard to fix it so that you don't
feel there's any type of bias," she said. "Just a draw. It's tough, but I
think it works."

Montgomery, a senior at Cumberland (Ky.) College, says her first
Olympics also will be her last.

"I'm going to finish my college season, but that's probably pretty much
it for me," she said. "I want to try something else (athletic), but I
don't know what yet. ... Nothing where you have to make weight anymore."

Hamaguchi, daughter of pro wrestler Heigo "The Animal" Hamaguchi,
scored a takedown 11 seconds into the match, rolled Montgomery and bolted to a
3-0 lead. The margin was 5-1 after the first of two three-minute periods.

"I'm always down, so I didn't freak out about it," Montgomery said. "I
just didn't get it back, so what can you do?"

Twice Montgomery cut her deficit to three points in the final period,
the last time at 7-4 with a minute left. But she came no closer.

"We just got down early," said Terry Steiner, the national women's
coach. "Toccara, we want to be able to set the tone and kind of establish her
dominance from the start. Getting down, it's not where we wanted to go
with it, but she's also capable of big points. We just didn't get that going
today.

"We got ones instead of threes on our takedowns. Toccara's as good as
anyone in there. Just today, it wasn't there. As far as the draw, I guarantee
you Hamaguchi didn't want to wrestle us first round, either."

Hamaguchi has won three of four matches from Montgomery. Last year at
New York, the pride of Japan beat Montgomery in the World Championship
finals.

A month later, with the World Cup team title resting on the outcome of
their match, Montgomery prevailed in Tokyo.

None of that mattered Sunday.

So while Hamaguchi goes for gold Monday, Montgomery can do no better
than fifth.

"I think it was a positive experience," she said, "considering
everything that happened up until now."

She said she will leave Athens on Wednesday, set to begin classes at
Cumberland on Thursday.

Was her Athens experience worth the work and dedication?

"Yea," she said. "I guess so."

---

Team USA's Patricia Miranda (48 kilos, 106-pounds) and Sara McMann (63
kilos, 139 pounds) each advanced to Monday's semifinals. Miranda won
all three of her pool matches. McMann, in a three-woman pool that had
everyone finishing 1-1, advanced because she pinned former world champion Meng
Lili of China.

Tela O'Donnell (55 kilos, 121 pounds) will wrestle for fifth place. She
split two matches, losing 11-1 to semifinalist Tonya Verbeek of Canada.