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Haryana state emerges champion in Indian national women's wrestling
New Delhi, INDIA, - Jun 28, 2004 (PTI)
Haryana topped with four gold and three silver medals in the eighth senior women freestyle national wrestling championship held at Jammu from June 24 to 26.
The second and the third spots were grabbed by MTNL Sports Control Board with three gold, one silver and one bronze and Chaudhary Bharat Singh Memorial Sports School (CBSMS) Nidani, with two silver and four bronze medals respectively.
As many as 17 affiliated units of the Wrestling Federation of India participated in the competition organised by the Jammu and Kashmir Wrestling Association under the aegis of WFI.
Results: 48kg: Shumal Khan (MTNL, gold); Nirmal Bora (Har, silver); Sunita Rani (CBSMS, bronze) 51kg: Neha Rathi (Har, gold); Meena (MTNL, silver); Indu Sharma (UP, bronze) 55kg: Sunita Sharma (Har, gold); Poonam (CBSMS, silver); Ratna (Jhar, bronze) 59kg: Alka Tomar (UP, gold); Anita (Har, silver); Neelam Suhag (Del) 63kg: Gitika Jakhar (Har, gold); Poonam (CBSMS, silver); Parveen Sihag (Del, bronze) 67kg: Manju Shekhawat (Har, gold); Parveen (Jhar, silver); Jyoti (CBSMS, bronze) 72kg: Sonika Kaliraman (MTNL, gold); Neeru (Har, silver); Pooja (Del, bronze).
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By Elliott Almond 6/28/04
Mercury News
Mercury News photo -- Jim Gensheimer |
LAS VEGAS - The flash of Glitter Gulch, right outside the Las Vegas Convention Center, could not have been more distant to Patricia Miranda as she prepared for her match and for her anointment as a potential wrestling star of the 2004 Olympic Games.
``Three minutes!'' yelled her boyfriend, Levi Weikel-Magden.
As the quarterfinal match at the U.S. championships last April drew near, Miranda inserted a lime green and blue mouth guard. She sat in front of Weikel-Magden, whom she met on the Stanford wrestling team six years ago. He leaned forward and rubbed her chocolate hair until she rose and play-wrestled with him as though they were brother and sister.
Music drowned out the audience's hum. ``Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?'' Miranda stood and slapped her face, thighs, calves, shoulder blades.
She lunged at ghosts.
She was ready.
The compact competitor defeated her opponent 10-0, a small step toward the Athens Games where Miranda, a 25-year-old from Saratoga, is favored to win a medal in the first women's wrestling tournament in Olympic history.
After losing her mother at 10, after facing taunts that came with being a female wrestler, after overcoming a father's fear of her close combat with boys, yes, Miranda was ready for it all.
In 1989, the Miranda family took a trip to Brazil, where Jose and Lia Miranda lived before immigrating to Montreal in the 1970s. The voyage home to California, a combination of missed flights and lost luggage, took its toll on the children.
``I was a brat,'' Miranda recalled.
Jose and Lia were so fed up by the time they arrived that they left their four children home and went out to dinner. Lia suffered an aneurysm in the car, went into a coma and died two weeks later. She was 42.
``When she died, we got stuck with a father we didn't really know,'' Miranda's older sister, Andrea, said.
Jose's mother and a Brazilian nanny helped rear the children. Everyone, including Jose, a physician in Los Gatos, dealt with the loss separately.
How did they make it?
``I don't know,'' Jose said, looking up. ``Help from upstairs.''
Then he thought of a metaphor. It was like shaking a box with puzzle pieces: ``You throw it and hope it falls into place.''
Miranda, who has not forgotten how she acted in her mother's final hours, soon fell into wrestling.
``It's how she took control of her life,'' Andrea, 26, said.
Said Miranda: ``I was hungry to be part of something that I could be addicted to.''
When she started, in eighth grade, she did not realize gender would be an issue. Miranda, like most women in amateur wrestling, had to deal with the psychological drama as much as the physical.
``It was her and 300 boys,'' said Jose, who threatened to sue Saratoga High to stop her from competing.
His major concern was education, so as long as she got A's he let Miranda wrestle. She took to the challenge, earning all A's and going on to Stanford, where she received a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's in international relations. Miranda will enter Yale Law School two weeks after the Athens Games end.
``She is not a born athlete,'' Jose said. ``But Patricia will stick with it and she will analyze it and figure out how to do it. Her mother was like that.''
The twin achievements in athletics and academics are the sum of Miranda's life. She shut herself off, making few real friends.
``Ask her who Beyoncé is,'' said Weikel-Magden, also a law student.
He reconsidered.
``No, because I just told her. Ask her about Usher, what everybody else her age knows about in American culture.''
When asked about the musician, Miranda gave a blank stare.
But ask her to reflect on her self-worth and Miranda has something to say. Especially when it comes to an incident at a high school wrestling tournament during her junior season. She lost twice and heard someone in the crowd say, ``You don't belong on the mat. You're a joke.''
She went to a bathroom and cried.
``Am I a joke?'' she wondered.
Miranda, the team captain, had to find out.
Before considering Olympic gold, Miranda had a private goal: She wanted to beat a guy in college. At 5 feet, 102 pounds, Miranda is slight enough to get lost in the fraternity of muscled men. It's one thing to succeed on the mat in high school, when some boys may not have reached puberty, but college wrestlers are big, strong and quick. Six schools, including Menlo College, have women's teams. Stanford does not.
In college practices, Miranda often went weeks without scoring a point. Coaches told her she had little chance of making varsity. Still, she kept showing up for practice, and in her fifth year she finally made the team.
Weikel-Magden saw their Stanford teammates bristle when the two began as freshmen. He had seen it before, when he tried to keep his sister off his high school team to spare her the rejection of the boys. That only strengthened her resolve, as she wrestled her senior year.
At Stanford, Weikel-Magden did not intervene when Miranda got pounded in practice. He knew she had to earn respect.
``Sometimes her face looked like it was taken through a cheese cutter,'' he said.
It reminded Andrea of junior high school, when Miranda came home so beat she had to be carried upstairs.
The wrestler, though, seemed impervious to pain. In her mind, Miranda kept wondering, Can I be tougher than everyone else? Can I win?
``I just had to know,'' she said.
Stanford coaches suggested Miranda continue practicing with the Cardinal but accept a stipend as part of the U.S. national team. But if she took the money, Miranda would lose her collegiate eligibility. She refused.
She had not answered the question.
Then, it happened. In an out-of-season tournament in Reno during her senior year, Miranda defeated a man 7-4 without much fanfare.
``I don't know if that totally validates me as a human being, but emotionally it did,'' she said. ``I wasn't just wasting my time all these years.''
She also won two other matches that year -- one by forfeit, the other against a woman.
Wrestling is the latest traditionally male sport to begin an Olympic tournament for women, following water polo and weightlifting in 2000. But many female wrestlers still feel as though they are on the fringe.
``If you ask 100 people in wrestling, 99 will say, `I don't like it,' '' said Terry Steiner, the coach of the U.S. women's national team.
Many in the wrestling world blame Title IX, the landmark federal legislation that requires equal funding for women's sports, for major cuts in men's college programs.
Miranda, a two-time world silver medalist at 105 1/2 pounds, understands the importance of making a societal statement. But that's not why she competes. The only legitimacy she craves is her own.
When Miranda lost the gold-medal match at the world championships last year in New York, she told Steiner, ``Maybe it's just not for me. I don't have it in me.''
Not to Steiner: ``If she doesn't have it in her, then no one does.''
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By J.J. HENSLEY
jjhensley@gctelegram.com
Posted on Monday, June 28, 2004 1:05:42 PM
The Olympics don't start for another seven weeks, but Garden City got its own version of Olympic competition Saturday with the Ultimate Sports Challenge at Coyote's Fitness Club.
The sports challenge, including competition in Olympic events such as martial arts, boxing, powerlifting and three styles of wrestling, was organized by Shanna Smith and the Collier family of Garden City. It ostensibly was a benefit for James Collier, who has cancer, and Smith's daughter who also is ill.
But Collier said he doesn't see himself as the one who will benefit in the long run. He wants to make events like this a regular occurrence for youths in Garden City.
"We just said, ?Let's get together and do something for the kids,'" he said. "Some of these wrestling groups haven't had a tournament in a year or more."
With that in mind, Collier and his family spent the better part of the last two weeks going around town to get goods donated for the event. Coyote's contacted them, he said, and offered to let the group use the building for free and cover the costs of insurance.
On Saturday afternoon, plenty of young and old athletes in southwest Kansas were glad they did. Nearly 40 area residents participated in the martial arts competition, and the same number signed up for wrestling, which attracted competitors from Ulysses, Cimarron, Dodge City, Lakin, Garden City and Rocky Ford, Colo.
"This is the first time we've done it. Hopefully we'll get more out next year," said Bob Dey of Garden City, who coordinated the tournament with the help of his wife, Jeanie.
Lakin's Tina Ward was one of the many area children who got to enjoy the hard work of all the volunteers at Saturday's event. As the only female wrestler in the field, she knew to expect some fierce competition on the mat from the guys wrestling at her 105-pound weight.
As Dusty Briggs, a former Garden City High School wrestler said, "You don't want to lose to them."
Briggs wrestled at 125-pounds his senior year and took third in the state. He wrestled a few women in his time on the GCHS team, and said it was a different experience.
Still, Ward only lost her first match, in freestyle, by one point, and won her folkstyle match as Briggs looked on.
"It seems like they try harder," Ward said about the boys she has to wrestle.
Ward started wrestling about three years ago, when her brother started. About half-way through that year, she said, she started begging her mom to let her wrestle, too. Eventually mom relented, a day male wrestlers in the area may live to lament, though it's female wrestlers Ward said she has to watch out for.
"Girls are harder than boys," Ward said, "because they're more flexible."
Ward is a member of the Lakin Mat Crew and belongs to an all-girls wrestling squad from Wichita with a handful of members. That group travels to a few tournaments each year, and last year, the team went to the national tournament in Minneapolis, where Ward won third place in the 105-pound weight class.
She's the only girl on her team in Lakin and said her teammates don't really give her a hard time.
"They just try to beat me all the time," she said.