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Rulon Gardner

World-class athletes, by their nature, have some level of luck. Many have had hard lives, but all have had the confluence of genetics, opportunity and talent that they capitalized on through hard work. It's difficult to envision a athlete at the top of their sport one could conceivably consider unlucky.

Rulon Gardner won a gold medal, a bronze medal and a world championship in wrestling. He also, in the third grade, accidentally impaled himself on an arrow and had to walk to the hospital with it stuck in his abdomen. It would be one of many brushes with death he would narrowly survive.

Gardner is the platonic ideal of the traditional American country wrestler. He was born in Afton, a town in Wyoming which at the time had just 1,290 people in it. (Fun fact: With nine children, two parents and a grandparent, the Gardner family alone was roughly 1% of the entire population, and the insane strength that would become the central pillar of his career was cultivated through endless work on the family dairy farm. His path was clear at a young age: By the time he graduated from high school he was already well-known as a wrestler, football player and track star with multiple athletic scholarships that carried him through college. But he never won an NCAA championship, or a Pan-Am title, or a world championship. He was a heavyweight walk-on for America's 2000 Olympic wrestling squad--a position that meant, in the best possible circumstance, running into the brick wall that was Aleksandr Karelin.

Karelin is widely considered the greatest wrestler of all time. He won 29 international wrestling championships in his life, including three Olympic gold medals. Where some wrestlers were known for a clever counter or a quick pin, Karelin was known for deadlifted opponents in a gutwrench and hurling them into the floor. He hadn't been defeated in twelve years--he hadn't given up so much as a point in six. And he had already wrestled Gardner once before at an international competition--and, as with everyone else he faced, he'd ragdolled the almost 300-pound American with ease.

Some were surprised when Rulon Gardner made it to the gold medal match against Karelin at the Sydney Olympics. Everyone was surprised when he beat him. In one of the greatest upsets in the history of wrestling and possibly sports in general, Gardner and Karelin fought to a stalemate--and Gardner won by just one point after breaking Karelin's clinch. The world of wrestling lost its mind. Karelin retired on the spot. Almost two decades later, Russian wrestling fans are still extremely mad.

Rulon Gardner was the best wrestler in the world, for one shining moment. He'd beaten the best wrestler of all time. It would be easy to assume his life had reached a peak of weirdness and it would all be downhill thereafter. But Gardner was too unlucky for that.

In 2002, Rulon Gardner was separated from his friends while exploring the Star Valley mountains by snowmobile. He crashed into a partially frozen river and was stranded in sub-zero temperatures for eighteen hours. He a chunk of his right foot and a toe, which he keeps in a jar of formaldehyde in his refrigerator.

In 2004, just before qualifiers for the Athens Olympics, Gardner was t-boned and thrown from his motorcycle. He somehow survived the crash with no major injuries. He would go on to win a bronze medal, over which he retired, believing himself no longer capable of competing--which opened his schedule up for another combat sport altogether.

Pride had been trying to get Gardner ever since he defeated Karelin, who had a large following in Japan thanks to his own (worked) mixed martial arts match with wrestling star Akira Maeda in 1999. Gardner had always refused, but having retired from active competition, he was less willing to turn down the opportunity. Pride booked him against Hidehiko Yoshida at their big New Year's Eve event, Shockwave 2004--gold medal vs gold medal, national hero vs national hero, with the not-so-subtle hope that the far more experienced, far more well-rounded 4-1-1 Yoshida would be able to defeat the less-trained wrestler.

It became clear Pride management had deeply underestimated Gardner when, just forty seconds into the fight, he dropped and nearly knocked out Yoshida with a single jab.

In one of the most impressive debuts in MMA history--relative to fighters who hadn't trained to fight in MMA, at least--Gardner put on a clinic. His jabs were crisp and stiff, his submission defense was on point, and his wrestling ability more than countered Yoshida's judo. By the end of the fight Yoshida had been thoroughly battered, Gardner had won a clear decision, and Pride immediately offered him a million-dollar contract to return and fight Fedor Emelianenko.

He turned them down. Years later when asked about the contract by Ariel Helwani, Gardner said unlike the thrill of wrestling or football, every time he punched Hidehiko Yoshida, he only felt bad. As he put it: "As I was hitting him I'm like, 'This isn't fun. This isn't why I became an athlete.' I just didn't have the killer instinct to go out there and just try to hurt somebody." No matter his success as a wrestler, he was still a kind, small-town farmboy who would rather go home than punch someone for a million dollars.

In 2007, Gardner and two friends narrowly survived the crash of a small passenger plane. After yet another near-death experience, Gardner began questioning his own retirement, and in 2012 he attempted an Olympic comeback off the strength of his success at the international Kiki Cup wrestling competition, only to find he wasn't even eligible to compete anymore--new standards capped the US team at 264.5 pounds, and Gardner, who at 41 was now heavier than ever and had in fact recently been on the weight-loss reality television show The Biggest Loser, had no hope of making the weight. In interviews after he failed to qualify he insisted he wasn't returning to retirement, and swore everyone would see him again.

But he never made it back to competition. The stress of life, from competition to the financial insecurity of farming to his constant near-death experiences, drove his weight back up and his checkbook down. He ultimately filed for bankruptcy and auctioned off most of his possessions--including his gold medal. He took work as a medical device representative and a high school wrestling coach, but as recently as 2018, was still talking about one more try at the Olympics.

In another life where he'd kept himself in shape, he might have been able to do it. In another life where he stuck with mixed martial arts, he could easily have been a world champion. In another life he died in a car accident, or a plane crash, or as a scared kid in the third grade with an arrow in his guts.

But in this life, he was the biggest wrestler in the world, he has one of the greatest accomplishments in sports, and he made it to middle age with a family he loves. I hope that can be enough for him.

Moveset, stats, logic and four attires (Pride: Shockwave 2004 vs Yoshida / 2000 Sydney Olympics vs Karelin / 2004 Athens Olympics vs Tsurtumia / 2012 Kiki Cup vs Bernardino).