Her own dad once was among the multitude of doubters. But Sunday, Patricia Miranda and her three U.S. women’s wrestling teammates went a long way toward making believers of a skeptical public.
Miranda and Sara McMann finished first in their groups and advanced to Monday’s semifinals at the Olympic Games.
Jose Miranda admits to being a little fuzzy on the rules of wrestling, and he once threatened to sue the school district in Saratoga, Calif., for allowing his daughter to participate in a so-called boys sport. But now he is in Athens, rooting his daughter on.
“He brought the whole family, and that really meant a lot to me,” said his daughter, a Stanford graduate who wrestled on the university’s men’s team.
Miranda, 25, won her three matches in the 48-kg (105.5-pound) category. She clinched her spot in the medal round with a decisive 11-1 technical fall against Mayelis Caripa of Venezuela. This is the first time women’s freestyle wresting has been included in the Olympics.
Miranda, an indifferent student in high school, admitted she had “butted heads” with her father over the question of wrestling, but she said he finally yielded on the condition that she improve her grades. She became a straight-A student and a top-rated wrestler.
But even then her father kept his distance from the sport.
“Wrestling just wasn’t part of our relationship,” she said.
That changed last year, when she won the U.S. nationals for the second time.
Miranda, who has been accepted at Yale Law School, hopes to present her father with an Olympic medal, but she acknowledged that what he really wants is for her to resume her studies.
McMann, 23, the other U.S. semifinalist, wrestled on the men’s team at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania. McMann won her first match but lost her second. Still, she had enough points to finish first in her pool at 63 kg (139 pounds).
“I wrestled not to lose,” McMann said, adding that she would not make that mistake in the medal round.
The U.S. had high hopes for Toccara Montgomery, 21, a student at Cumberland College in Kentucky, one of only six U.S. colleges with a women’s wrestling program.
Montgomery is regarded as the world’s second best in the 72-kg (158.5-pound) class, but she had the bad luck to draw world No. 1 Kyoko Hamaguchi as her first opponent. In what could have been the gold-medal match, Hamaguchi won 8-4.
“That’s the draw,” Montgomery said. “It’s tough, but it’s fair.”
Tela O’Donnell, 22, who was raised in a log cabin and played boys football in Homer, Alaska, had one pin, but lost her chance to advance with an 11-1 loss in her next match.
Miranda will face reigning world champion Irini Merleni of Ukraine in her semifinal Monday. McMann faces Stavroula Zygouri of Greece. Japan, the dominant power in the sport, was the only team to reach the semis in every weight.
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It has been a long road to Athens for the Americans. They’ve suffered the taunts of wrestling fans who don’t believe the sport is for women. They’ve been snubbed by male competitors who would rather take a forfeit than wrestle a girl.
For Patricia Saunders, a coach on the U.S. team and one of the finest female wrestlers in the sport’s history, the first day of Olympic competition stirred mixed feelings. She has a case full of trophies but was never able to compete in the Olympics because the the women’s event was not recognized.
Twice, in 1992 and ’96, Saunders trained for the Games, only to be disappointed when the IOC declined to include women’s wrestling.
“It was a lot more bitter than sweet,” she said. “But the fact is that [wrestling] is in there now, and there’s nothing bittersweet about that. I’m just happy for our team. This is a big thing. It’s just not about me.”
Appearing in the Olympics already has done a lot to blunt the jokes about female mud wrestling. A medal would do even more. Said Miranda: “It gives us a platform to say, `Hey look at us. You see the sport. You see the sweat and tears.'”