My Fight / Your Fight (11 page)

This is the place
, I thought.
This is where I am going to shock the world.

I was not just the youngest judo competitor on the US team. I was the youngest judo competitor in the entire Athens Olympic field. No one expected anything of me. I was going to prove them all wrong.

Like always, I went to bed the night before I fought, thirsty and starving.

A few hours later, I bolted upright. The dream had felt so real. I had been standing in a room, not the dorm room, but an unknown room. I was lying on my back and balancing a bottle of Pepsi in my mouth. It was opened and the contents were pouring down my throat as I drank it thirstily with no hands.

I woke up feeling that I had done something I should not have. Then it hit me, it was just a dream and I drifted back into a restless sleep, hungry and dehydrated.

In the morning the shadow of the dream was gone. I felt ready. It was “showtime.” I was going to win.

I headed straight to the bathroom to force myself to pee. I was dehydrated so I didn't have much, but I needed every possible ounce out of my body. I stepped on the scale and held my breath. Its digital readout registered sixty-three kilograms exactly. I exhaled.

I wasn't going to risk showering and having wet hair put me over weight. I threw on some sweats, tossed a couple bottles of water and a banana in my bag, then grabbed a few more bottles of water. I checked twice to make sure I had my ID, both times realizing it was on a lanyard dangling around my neck. I looked at the clock: 7:43.

I walked across a dirt patch that probably should have been a courtyard garden, but had been unfinished in the rush to get all the essential buildings done for the Games. The air was warm and the sun was beating down, but I was so dehydrated that, even though I was walking briskly, I didn't break a sweat. I checked in. There were only a few other girls from my division there. We ignored each other as we waited. I slipped off my Team USA sweats, my bra and underwear, walked up to the scale, and stepped on the scale completely naked. Sixty-three kilograms exactly. A female official with a clipboard recorded the weight, then gave me a nod.

I jumped off the scale, pulled on my underwear and grabbed a bottle of water and chugged the entire thing. I downed another bottle as I pulled my sweats back on. I devoured my banana in two bites, then headed back into the village courtyard drinking another bottle of water. My all-you-can-eat cafeteria extravaganza would have to wait until after I competed, but oatmeal had never tasted so amazing.

On the shuttle bus to the arena, I listened to Green Day's “Waiting” on repeat and thought about how my wait was almost over.

Officials led us from the underground garage through a concrete tunnel lit by fluorescent lighting. The warm-up room was large and open and filled with mats.

Usually the coaching staff brings in the person on the team who fought the day before to help you warm up, but that person was Ellen Wilson, and as one of the Olympic Training Center crew, she wasn't going to show up to help me out. Instead, I warmed up with Marisa Pedulla, one of our coaches. It was a quick warm-up, then I went and took a nap. It was a restful sleep, but not a deep one.

I was ready.

“Ronda Rousey,” a man with a clipboard was calling my name. My match was up next. I walked over with Marisa to the volunteer assigned to carry the basket where I would put my sweats and shoes while I fought.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, handing my basket carrier my stuff. “Thanks so much.”

We stood waiting in line. My opponent, Claudia Heill of Austria, was right next to me. We did not acknowledge each other.

And so it begins
, I thought.

The official led us into the arena. It was early in the day, so the place was only about a quarter filled, but the crowd was already loud.

“Go Ronda! Yeah, Ronda!” I did not look around, but I could hear my mom and sister Maria from the stands. No matter how large the venue, my family is so loud they can be heard from anywhere.

I stepped onto the mat and bowed. I stomped my left foot twice. Then my right. I jumped. I took a few steps, shaking my arms. I slapped my right shoulder, then my left, then my thighs. I touched the ground. It was time.

I lost in the first round. It was a bullshit call. I threw her and the officials acted like nothing had happened.

As if watching from an extreme distance, I saw the referee right next to me raise a hand in my opponent's direction. I felt disoriented. I didn't know what to do or where to go or how to process what was happening.
This is not how it was supposed to go
, I thought. It was as if the world had been turned upside down. I was in shock. I walked off the mat fighting back tears.

She knew it was a bullshit call, but she took the win over me and went on to take the silver medal. I was not yet good enough to win twice on a bad day.

Then I had to wait. In international judo competition, if you lose to someone who makes the semifinal, you are entered into repechage, a consolation bracket with a chance to fight for the bronze medal. Because Heill made it to the semifinals, I was entered into the repechage bracket. I tried to refocus and pull myself together.
You still have to fight
, I reminded myself.
Your day is not over
. But my heart felt broken.

I won my first repechage match against Great Britain's Sarah Clark, the same girl who beat me at the US Open. I was one step closer to an Olympic medal. It wouldn't be gold, but a bronze would still be a pretty impressive finish for a seventeen-year-old kid.
You'll be OK with that
, I tried to convince myself. Then I lost to Hong Ok-song of Korea the next round. It wasn't a dramatic defeat. She didn't even do anything. She won by a minor score against me on a penalty. I kept attacking until the very end, but time ran out. I was out of the tournament.

I felt numb at the sound of the buzzer. I waited for the emotion to wash over me, for the tears to fall, for my knees to give out. But I realized that I couldn't feel any more pain. I had lost the Olympics, but it wasn't in that match. I had lost them when the officials called my win for Claudia Heill. I had fought two more matches since that one, but I never came back.

Overall, I finished ninth, the best finish of any woman on the US judo team. But it wasn't good enough for me.

After I was eliminated, I gathered my things. The team's media relations manager led me back through the maze of hallways. We passed athletes, coaches, cameramen, security guards, event volunteers in electric blue polo shirts, and various Olympic officials. We headed up two flights of concrete stairs, our footsteps echoing as we ascended the empty, dimly lit stairwell. We reached the second landing and a security guard pushed open the door. The light of the arena made me squint. My mom and Maria were standing on the other side of the door.

My mom had the look of genuine concern she only reserves for when you're really sick. Her sympathy was unbearable. I wanted disappointment. I wanted anger. I wanted her to tell me I could have done more. Sympathy meant she believed I had lost despite giving it everything I had. I lowered my eyes.

“I'm so sorry,” I said. As the words tumbled out, the reality set in. I had lost.

Huge sobs racked my body. I fell into my mom's arms and cried harder than I've ever cried. My mom held me tight, and I buried my face in her shoulder.

“You don't have to apologize,” my mom said, stroking my hair.

“But I let everyone down,” I choked out between sobs. “I let you down.”

“You didn't let me down,” my mom said. “You just had a bad day.”

As an athlete, you go through your career thinking the Olympics are going to be the pinnacle of your entire life. Olympian is a title that you have forever. Even when you die, you are an Olympian. But sometimes the moments you are led to expect will be the most life changing aren't.

The Olympic coach told me I should be proud of myself. My teammates congratulated me. Big Jim told me he saw some things we had to work on. I surpassed everyone's expectations, but fell short of my own. People had expected me to take part, but I had expected to take over.

I just wanted to get the hell out of Athens, away from my failure.

I caught the first flight home, leaving a week before the Games ended. I had wanted to fly with Mom but everything out of Athens was completely booked. Instead, I flew back to the States alone, staring at the seatback in front of me and replaying my losses in my head over and over, breaking them down, rewinding the missed opportunities. Each time I cycled through a match, the pain of the loss felt fresh. I had lost tournaments before, but I had never felt this level of crushing devastation. To be a competitor on the world's biggest stage was not enough. I was there for one reason: I was there to win.

I am determined to prove that there is no advantage anyone can have over me that will ever make a difference. At the beginning of a match, you and your opponent both start from zero. Where you take it from there is up to you.

Other people's advantages are not an excuse for you to lose; they should motivate you to beat them. Just because a person has all the development resources—all the coaches, all the scouting, all the tools to train at the highest level—just because a person won the last Olympics or beat you the last time you met or is pumped full of steroids, they don't get an extra score on the board when the fight starts.

The fight is yours to win.

My first major tournament after the Olympics was in Budapest, the 2004 Junior World Judo Championships that fall. I went into the tournament unaware of what a big deal it actually was. The junior worlds bring together the world's best competitors who are under the age of twenty-one. Competing at both the junior and senior levels internationally is rare, which meant I went from facing Olympians to facing future Olympians.

I took two weeks off after Athens, during which time I wallowed in self-pity. Then one day, my mom came into my room.

“That's enough of feeling sorry for yourself. Get up, you're going to practice,” she said. “Lying around saying ‘Poor me, I lost the Olympics' isn't going to change anything. You shouldn't be sad you lost, you should be angry.”

She was right. I went to practice that evening and slammed everyone. I was pissed off and embarrassed about how I did in Athens. I was still angry when I went back to Big Jim three weeks later. And I carried that with me when I headed to the 2004 junior worlds two months later.

Big Jim never addressed the 2004 Olympics with me, but he let Lillie McNulty, a friend I had made at a camp, come out for a week to train with me. That was his way of acknowledging how hard the loss must have been for me.

Matchups in judo tournaments are determined by a draw, where competitors are placed in two sides of a bracket and then paired up semi-randomly from there. (The overwhelming number of matchups between US and Japanese fighters in the first round of international competition makes me skeptical of just how “random” many draws actually are.) Some routes to the final can seem much easier than others.

Many competitors hope for the easy draw. People don't want to face the No. 1 in the first round. They want to get as far as they can without having to put out the effort. They hope someone else beats the person they're afraid of facing. They don't want to go through the best to be the best.

“Don't hope for the easy draw,” my mom used to tell me. “You are the bad draw. You be the person other girls hope they don't have to face.”

You don't look at the matchups and hope to have a good draw, making it easier for you to win. It doesn't matter who you have to fight and what order you have to fight them because to be the best in the world, you have to beat them all anyway.

I came out of the worst possible draw at the junior worlds, but it did not matter. I won my first three matches by ippon on the first day of the tournament, sending me to the semifinal. As we sat eating dinner that night, one of my teammates said that USA Judo officials were scrambling to find an American flag and a copy of the national anthem in Budapest. Each nation's delegation is tasked with bringing its own flag and copy of its anthem for the award ceremony. I laughed.

“No,” he said. “They really don't have it.”

They expected us all to lose, so no one thought to bring one.

It had never even crossed my mind that I would leave the tournament with anything but a gold medal. USA Judo hadn't even considered that a possibility.

As I prepared to face a girl from Russia, I had one question for the person appointed by USA Judo to coach me. He was not actually my coach. For major international competitions, the sport's governing body appoints a coaching team to travel with the athletes. For the most part, the coaching staff is purely symbolic. Success is not going to hinge on something a person you hardly know tells you as you're heading onto the mat. Success is born out of everything that leads up to you stepping on the mat. Before each of my matches, I asked members of the USA coaching staff whether my opponent was right- or left-handed so I could plan my first exchange. Each time, I was told, “I don't know. I wasn't paying attention to her last match, I was watching you.”

This time, I didn't even bother asking, I launched right into warming up with Lillie.

“Wait a minute,” my appointed coach said, watching us. “You're left-handed?”

My mouth dropped.

“Wait a minute, the only reason that you told me that you couldn't tell me whether these girls were left- or right-handed is because you were busy watching me and you don't even know that I'm left-handed?”

I walked away in total disgust. Across the mat, I saw my opponent's coach giving her instruction. I saw the coach go in toward her as if to demonstrate what I might do. He looked at her and tapped his left hand, indicating that I was a left-handed fighter. She nodded. All of the anger that I had been carrying with me rose to the surface. The Olympics. The missing American flag. The half-ass coaching. I had had enough, and this girl was going to pay.