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Raising an Olympian
Alone in the woods, an unconventional mom raises a future star

By TOM KIZZIA
Anchorage Daily News

(Published: August 8, 2004)

HOMER -- Once upon a time, there was an old woman who lived alone except for a small light that followed her around like a pet. The people of the unhappy village nearby shunned her -- all except a young girl who was drawn to the woman's home by the warmth and music of the light.

Olympic wrestler Tela O'Donnell used to fall asleep listening to this story as a little girl. She lived alone with her mother, Claire, in a log cabin in the woods that her mother built by herself through the trial-and-error method. Claire O'Donnell called it their "nest."

Tela's mother was a wonderful storyteller. She couldn't read a simple picture book without leaping to her feet to act out each character. This was not surprising -- Claire O'Donnell had been trained in a high-modernist school of mime in Paris as well as formal Japanese Noh theater in Tokyo, before leaving it all behind for the forests of Kachemak Bay.

The details of the old woman's story came easily each night as Claire made them up.

It was her own story. Hers and Tela's.

Olympic athletes come from all walks of life. But none of them has a story like Tela O'Donnell's.

It's a story her mom tells warily, now that her 22-year-old daughter is headed to Athens as a member of the first Olympic women's wrestling team -- a smiling forest sprite who is already charming fans and media with her own light and music.

Claire O'Donnell worries that other single women might try to emulate her life as an outlaw mom, an intense, aloof artist who came to Alaska 25 years ago with a midlife crisis ringing like a fire bell, in search of a fresh start and an obliging bachelor.

"I stole my chance for motherhood from society, so I had to raise her perfectly," she said. "I was lucky. I broke all the rules, but at least I knew it."

But it's also a story she tells with pride and unavoidable satisfaction. The story follows not only the daughter's rise but the transformation of the peace-loving mother, who was alarmed at first by the sport she considered "fake war."

"I approached it that my daughter was my greatest work of art. That there was no finer contribution I could make to the world than a fine human being," she said. "She exemplifies everything I've tried to do with my life, only she's doing it so much better, with the stamp of Tela on it."

UPSET VICTORY BRINGS ATTENTION

Tela O'Donnell tells reporters her name is "pronounced like 'Layla.' " Tela and her log cabin beginnings have started drawing attention since her upset victory in Indianapolis won her a berth on the four-woman U.S. freestyle wrestling team, competing at 55 kilograms (121 pounds). She is soft-spoken and thoughtful and smiles even when she is on the mat. Her name comes from a Japanese word for a Shinto shrine. She's part Japanese, and a town in Okinawa is having her photo printed on T-shirts -- though details of that part of her biography have been opaque. Homer, she told NBC, is "a beautiful, fishy, hippie, artsy kind of town."

When she won in Indianapolis, one smitten Ohio reporter described her as "an ebullient 5-foot-4 spitfire with Mary Lou Retton's smile, Brandi Chastain's tenacity and tales from America's Last Frontier that fill reporters' notebooks."

Some of those stories involve her mother, whom Tela calls tough and unconventional -- words to acknowledge the midlife changes necessary to undertake a life of not-so-genteel poverty in the woods. Homer, Tela told another reporter, "is a good place to raise a kid but not to have a career as a mime."

Claire O'Donnell came to Alaska at age 37 as a street mime. She was a serious person and not an especially happy clown. By turns indignant, obsessive and humorous, she had suffered through relationships and was still single. She wanted a child and time was running out. But it was more than that -- she wanted a life of simplicity and health, and time seemed to be running out for that too. She was dissatisfied with the distance between her ideals and her life in Chicago theater, where she was writing a play based on Ovid's "Metamorphosis," "about how society separated itself suicidally from Nature."

Claire was tall (nearly 6 foot 2 inches) and long-limbed. Born in Maine, she had studied mime in Paris with Etienne Decroux, the famous teacher of Marcel Marceau. She learned to see gestures as expressions of moral consciousness. She had gone on to Japan to study an even more esoteric form of moral theater and was deeply impressed by the Japanese culture, which she considered "more evolved" than America's.

She is embarrassed to admit that she stowed away on a ship to get home from Japan. Such an adventure would have been considered irresponsible by her Japanese teachers.

"That was my primitive Irish side that can laugh and challenge fate," she said.

Together with a friend who played saxophone, Claire spent the summer of 1979 larking around Alaska as the Baby's Breath Mime and Music Ensemble. During the Ninilchik State Fair, she visited Homer and was struck by a small group of beautiful children who seemed like "bursts of sunshine spirit."

"I was chasing Tela's spirit and found her here," Claire said today.

She returned to Homer with a small state arts council grant as featured artist for the spring arts festival in 1980. When the week was over, she flew home and sold everything and moved to Alaska.

She followed a well-trod path of young idealists to Yule Kilcher's homestead on McNeil Canyon, then pooled her money with several others to buy 40 acres of thick timber nearby, which they informally cut into thirds.

"I wanted to put my theory into practice and see if it held water," she said.

It was time to have a baby.

There was no shortage of eager bachelor fishermen in the woods of Homer. But none of them seemed a likely long-term partner. Chris Nakada was willing to keep a mutually agreed-upon distance after the deed was done. Better yet, from Claire's point of view, he was of Japanese descent, and his parents and brothers lived nearby.

"I wouldn't have done a sperm bank, even now," she said. "I wanted an extended family."

Claire had few dealings afterwards with Nakada, who moved to Hawaii. They had agreed the baby would be Claire's to raise.

"It was her mother's upbringing that got her where she's at," Chris Nakada said last week of Tela, in a short phone conversation.

But Claire and Tela did become drawn into the family of Chris' parents, Henry and Mitsu Nakada, who had retired to Homer from California. Mother and child would visit for holiday meals, and in later years Tela's grandparents helped subsidize trips to the Lower 48 that would establish her as a national-caliber wrestler.

The extended family proved to be one with its own remarkable history.

GRANDFATHER AIDED WWII RESCUE

Henry Nakada, now 81, served in Europe in World War II with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, said to be the most highly decorated unit in U.S. military history for its size and duration of service. The regiment was made up mostly of Japanese-American soldiers, who were at first barred from serving in the military. Nakada had two brothers who entered the unit with him, and four others were in the intelligence service in the Pacific.

While the seven Nakada sons served in the U.S. military, their parents, first-generation Japanese-American farmers from California, were held as dangerous aliens in an internment camp in Wyoming.

Nakada was a scout on the 442nd's most famous exploit, a six-day assault through German lines to save a unit of Texans that was cut off and surrounded on a ridge in the Vosges Mountains of France. Nakada's platoon was one of the first three to reach the Texans.

The regiment suffered 800 casualties to rescue the 221 men of the "Lost Battalion." Even today, questions remain about the decision to send the Japanese-American soldiers on what some considered a suicide mission.

"I'll never forgive that general," said Nakada, who considers the decision bad judgment, not racism.

Nakada had been working for the railroad in Alaska when war broke out. It was an adventure that prompted him years later to urge his sons to go north, with Henry Nakada following after he retired as a biochemistry professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

At first, the intelligence officer in charge of Alaska's Japanese-Americans wouldn't let him enlist, Nakada recalled. But eventually the officer relented. "He said, 'Damn it, Hank, you're about as American as anybody I ever met.' "

That was around the time when President Roosevelt opened the draft to Japanese-Americans with the words "Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry."

Every cycle of Olympics, those words of Roosevelt's ring true for the U.S. team -- as they will again this month in Athens when the Japanese-Irish wrestler from Homer takes to the mat.

BUILDING A CABIN ALONE

Pregnant at last, Claire O'Donnell set to work felling trees and peeling logs for a cabin, tying a pillow to her belly to protect her fetus from the roar of the chain saw. She worked alone, with a block and tackle to lift the logs into place, asking questions of neighbors as she went.

When Claire went into labor, she had to fix a flat on her Volvo, roll it downhill to jump-start it, then hike to a neighbor's house for help after getting stuck in a mudhole on Kilcher's road.

Mother and baby lived in a nearby abandoned homesteader cabin, and later in a wall tent. Mom lifted logs while her toddler played with chickens or dressed up in costumes. By the time Tela was 2, with rafters going up and snow on the ground, a friend gave them a cabin to stay in and provided child care. Claire and Tela moved into their new home for Christmas.

Existence was bare-bones. Claire bathed her daughter in the kitchen sink, heating water on the propane stove. They moved from one crisis to another -- the car would be broken down, the horse sick, the well dry. Claire supplemented single-mother welfare checks by mending fishnets and assembling holiday wreaths out of materials of the deep forest -- spruce roots, moss, lichen and wildflowers.

"If you tripped and fell on your face, all the elements of a beautiful work of art were right there," she said.

She had a few close friends but no social circle. She says she was not invited to neighborhood parties, was seldom asked to dance at contra dances. She stayed home and stayed busy. She fished, gardened and raised animals -- 47 at the peak, including sheep, cats, dogs, ducks, turkeys, chickens and a ferret. Tela would wrestle the sheep into place for shearing. Predation of sheep by black bears was a problem -- but more than once, Claire tracked down a disemboweled sheep in a nearby canyon and returned with the meat.

Through it all, Claire was trying to put her child-rearing philosophies into effect. "I always picked her up as a baby from her center of gravity, down low. I never dangled her. I was always assisting her to do her own thing, never doing it for her. Her whole body just got solid as she got more centered," she said.

She was attentive, even obsessive, about Tela's whole-grains diet, her posture, her sense of right and wrong.

"She fussed over her a bit more than I fussed over my kids, but I really admired her for being a proper mom," said a friend, Sara Berg, a nurse who said she came too often into contact with negligent mothers. "To see somebody giving a darn and paying attention to her kids, I love it."

Claire could be relentlessly self-correcting as a mother. "Her emotional, spiritual and biological needs were my governing body," she said. "Nobody supported that idea, of course. I was making her too powerful in my life. But that's how she became a powerful person. I gave her power over me."

Tela grew up with some of her mother's intensity. Evelyn Tymrak, a neighbor, recalled moving to a cabin in the dark woods when Tela was a girl. One evening she heard a high-pitched screaming from the direction of Claire's. The screaming would continue, then stop, then resume. Alarmed, Tymrak set off through the woods to see what was wrong. She found 8-year-old Tela trying to close a gate, leaning with all her strength to pull a post under a wire loop and screaming each time.

"She said, 'I've got to get this gate closed. My mother's going to kill me,' " Tymrak said.

Tela grew strong carrying logs, splitting wood and as a teenager working as a commercial fishing deckhand. She had a pony, and when she was 10 used a Permanent Fund check to buy an unbroken Morgan-appaloosa. It took her only three days to ride the horse bareback. Later that summer, Tela was barrel riding and jumping at the rodeo in Ninilchik.

But when she got to middle school, mother and daughter both recall, she proved inept at competitive sports. Tela says it was because there was no playing catch with mom, no soccer with neighborhood kids. Claire says ball-playing and competitiveness would have been a distraction when they were "trying to break through to the core of personal evolution."

But Tela got lucky with a physical education teacher who guided her into wrestling as a sport where she would compete against herself and undertake a program of self-improvement.

"That made sense to me," Tela said in July during a brief visit back to Homer before setting off to the Olympics. "Me beating someone else wasn't so important."

Sitting in the sunshine outside her cabin, Tela sounded almost nonchalant about how she settled into wrestling. There was no sudden flash of recognition. "There are not too many epiphanies in my life," she said. "I can't think of any, really. It just flows. It just is. It's like, 'Oh, I'm a wrestler, that's how it is.' "

She said it was good for her spirit to come back for a visit before Athens.

At the top level of competition, she said, athletes are very close in physical skills, and they compete by looking for an extra edge -- an unexpected move, extra hours of practice. For Tela, spirit had so far provided her with that "little bit extra."

Claire had always imagined a career as an artist for her daughter. It took a while to get used to the idea of her as a grappler. But Claire began to see wrestling as an extension of her own struggle to perfect herself, as a sport still in keeping with its Greek origins, with the ideals of harmony and personal excellence: "There it was -- the kids out there on the mat working with each other. The wiser teaching the novitiates. I liked what I saw it doing for her humanity."

At first, the local school district would only let Tela practice with the boys' wrestling team. She didn't get to compete against boys until high school, where she lost as often as she won. But in her sophomore year she entered a national girls' wrestling tournament in Michigan, unseeded and unknown, and won -- her first exciting taste of success, Claire said. In her junior and senior years, she competed in women's tournaments in Las Vegas and finished in the upper ranks. Back home, she won a sixth-place finish in the state wrestling tournament her senior year, wrestling against boys.

Tela spent a year studying and wrestling for one of the few women's programs, at Pacific University in Oregon. Her success that year -- she won an NAIA Coaches Championship -- snagged her an invitation to try out for the Olympic training center at Colorado Springs, where she has spent the last two years.

In 2003, she upset champ Tina George to win her first national championship at 55 kilograms. This year, George reclaimed the title, giving her an opening-round bye at the Olympic trials. Tela O'Donnell had to beat six opponents to win a best-of-three rematch with George. It took only two matches, and two pins, for Tela to become the first woman ever named to a U.S. Olympic wrestling team.

(A second native of Homer, Stacey Borgman, 29, is also competing in Athens, in lightweight double sculls rowing.)

Tela has commitments to keep wrestling this fall, but she is taking biology classes too and plans to finish college, with an eye on medical school. After the Olympics, however things turn out, she plans to stay in Europe and travel, with a friend and alone. Among her destinations, she said, is "Castle O'Donnell" in Ireland.

In a week or so, Claire and a small entourage of Tela's friends are flying off to Greece. Among them is a young man she describes as "a far-future boyfriend."

It was not the ending one might have expected for the story of the mother and daughter in the woods. There was another surprise twist too, involving Claire: just as the child at the center of her life was growing up and moving off into the world, love walked in.

At a family reunion, Claire became reacquainted with an old family friend. Tom Kane was struck first by the poise of her daughter, she said, and intrigued to meet the woman who had raised her. Two years ago, Kane and O'Donnell were married. Kane is from Maine, and the couple spend their winters there now.

"She's been looking and searching for that for so long," her friend Berg said. "He came in her life at the perfect time."

For Claire O'Donnell, now 62, the world finally seems to be riding a little more lightly on her shoulders.

She's watching Tela distance herself, and it's all right. "Her coach and the other wrestlers are her family now, as she's honing in on her goal," Claire said. "That's good."

The cabin in Homer has become a summer place -- the animals gone, the garden scaled back, the half-finished barn sagging a little. She brought in a backhoe this summer to shore up the cabin's foundation so she can rent it out.

"Things are starting to fall apart before I even finish them," she said with a little laugh.

Recent years have transformed the forest as well, filling the neighborhood with light. Bark beetles killed all the stately green spruce trees, which have fallen over or been logged. The mossy stasis of the deep forest where she built her wreaths is gone, replaced by grass and alder and other new plants she calls "vigorous and opportunistic." The sky has unfolded around the cabin, as the trees fell away to expose a wide view of the bay and mountains.

Claire says the little cabin in the big dark woods, where a small light glowed, will be a memory mother and daughter will always share.

Reporter Tom Kizzia can be reached at tkizzia@adn.com or in Homer at 1-907-235-4244.

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OLYMPIANS

FOUR ALASKANS are competing in Athens in wrestling, rowing, basketball and shooting. A look at their chances

Friday in sports FOR MORE on Tela O'Donnell's wrestling career, go online to www.adn.com/links

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Watch for Tela O'Donnell

• Cable channel CNBC (Channel 41 in Anchorage, 39 in Homer) will telecast women's freestyle wrestling from Athens. The first matches get under way late Saturday night Aug. 21. The channel plans women's wrestling coverage as part of a segment airing from 10 p.m. Saturday ADT through noon Sunday Aug. 22. Several other sports will be covered in the segment. If O'Donnell advances to the semifinals, coverage of that is planned in a segment from 10 p.m. Sunday to 3 a.m. Monday Aug. 23 on the same channel. Finals coverage is 7 a.m. to noon Monday Aug. 23.

WOMEN'S WRESTLING

• Debut: This is the first Olympics to include women's wrestling.

• U.S. Team: In addition to O'Donnell, the four-woman team includes Patricia Miranda, Sara McMann and Toccara Montgomery. Three of the four U.S. Olympians won silver medals at last year's world championships.

• Favorite: In O'Donnell's weight class of 55 kilograms (121 pounds), Saori Yoshida of Japan is favored.

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NBC networks to televise wrestling all eight days of the competition from the Athens Olympics, Aug. 22-29

7/21/2004
Gary Abbott/USA Wrestling

The NBC networks have posted a schedule of daily highlights of the television coverage of the Athens Summer Olympic Games.

Based upon the posting on NBCOlympics.com, there is scheduled television coverage of wrestling on all eight days of the Olympic wrestling competition from August 22-29. The wrestling action is planned for three specific networks: NBC, MSNBC and CNBC.

Women’s wrestling is held August 22-23. Men’s Greco-Roman wrestling is held August 24-26. Men’s freestyle wrestling is held August 27-29.

Included in the coverage are five different live segments of the wrestling action, three on MSNBC and two on CNBC.

NBC has wrestling scheduled on its national broadcast five different days, including both men’s Greco-Roman and men’s freestyle action. NBC has also specifically targeted the Greco-Roman super heavyweight division, featuring defending Olympic champion Rulon Gardner, for primetime network coverage.

Fans can check these program listings by visiting NBCOlympics.com

The broadcasters assigned to wrestling includes Russ Hellickson (play-by-play), Jeff Blatnick (analyst) and Len Berman (reporter).

This schedule includes just “highlights” of the coverage. These listings are subject to change. There could be additional wrestling coverage based upon the decisions of the broadcasting executives as the Games progress.

There will be much more detailed schedule information as the Olympics approach, as well as during the actual Olympic Games. NBC has announced that it will have an Interactive Television Viewer’s Guide, which will be available by early August on NBCOlympics.com. It will provide 24-hour coverage on the NBC Universal networks. Viewers will be able to sort the listings by sport, network, day and time, as well as search by key words such as athlete, team or country. This will allow wrestling fans to know more details about when the wrestling coverage will actually be aired.

The networks of NBC: NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, USA, Bravo, Telemundo and NBC HDTV will broadcast an unprecedented 1,210 hours – more than the past five Summer Olympics combined.

NBC BROADCAST SCHEDULE HIGHLIGHTS
As of July 20. Subject to change. Check for updates on NBCOlympics.com

Sunday August 22
CNBC (2 a.m. – 4 p.m. ET) – Wrestling - Women’s Competition (LIVE)

Monday, August 23
MSNBC (2:00 a.m. – 7:00 a.m. ET) – Wrestling – Women’s Semifinals
MSNBC (11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. ET) – Wrestling – Women’s Gold Medal Finals

Tuesday, August 24
NBC (8:00 p.m. – Midnight ET/PT) - Wrestling – Super Heavyweight Greco-Roman Competition
NBC (12:30 a.m. – 2:00 a.m. ET/PT) – Wrestling – Greco-Roman Competition
MSNBC (2:00 a.m. – 7:00 a.m. ET) – Wrestling – Greco-Roman Competition (LIVE)

Wednesday, August 25
NBC (8:00 p.m. – Midnight ET/PT) – Wrestling – Super Heavyweight Greco-Roman Gold Medal Final
NBC (12:35 a.m. – 2:00 a.m. ET/PT) – Wrestling – Greco-Roman Gold Medal Finals
MSNBC (2:00 a.m. – 7:00 a.m. ET) – Wrestling – Greco-Roman Semifinals (LIVE)

Thursday, August 26
NBC (12:35 a.m. – 2:00 a.m. ET/PT) – Wrestling – Greco-Roman Gold Medal Finals
MSNBC (2:00 a.m. – 7:00 a.m ET) – Wrestling – Greco-Roman Semifinals (LIVE)

Friday, August 27
NBC (12:35 a.m. – 2:00 a.m. ET/PT) – Wrestling – Freestyle Competition

Saturday, August 28
NBC (12:00 Noon – 6:00 p.m. ET/PT) – Wrestling – Freestyle Gold Medal Finals
NBC (8:00 p.m. – 12:00 Midnight ET/PT) – Wrestling – Freestyle Gold Medal Finals
NBC (12:30 a.m. – 2:00 a.m. ET/PT) – Wrestling – Freestyle Gold Medal Finals
MSNBC (3:00 a.m. – 5:00 a.m. ET/PT) – Wrestling – Freestyle Competition

Sunday, August 29
CNBC (3:00 a.m. – 12:00 Noon ET/PT) – Wrestling – Freestyle Gold Medal Finals (LIVE)

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Nordhagen leads Cdn women's wrestling team

By JULIE SCOTT 8/7/04

(CP) - During the 1999 Pan American Games, Christine Nordhagen cried as she sat in the stands at Winnipeg Stadium watching her husband and fellow wrestler Leigh Vierling march in the opening ceremonies.

While most of the tears were happy there were a few sad ones, too. Would there ever be a day when she would get that same opportunity?

"I think I was emotional not only because I was so proud of my husband for making the team but I felt something was not there for me," she said after a recent Canadian team training camp in Guelph, Ont. "I had all these great experiences but I had never been at a major games. I was saddened by that, that I never had that opportunity. I'm so excited that now I get that chance."

The 33-year-old teacher, who grew up in Valhalla Centre, Alta., and now lives in Calgary, will compete for Canada in the 72-kilogram division in Athens, where women's freestyle wrestling will make its Olympic debut. And while it may be new to the Olympic program, it's certainly isn't for Nordhagen and her counterparts.

The first women's world championships were held in 1987.

Nordhagen took up the sport 12 years ago while she was a student at the University of Alberta. With six world championships to her credit, she's the most successful female wrestler in the world.

The last couple of years haven't been easy, however. Arthroscopic surgery on both knees combined with other injury problems forced her to miss the past two world championships. But she's healthy again and ready to compete in one of the world's biggest sporting events.

"I've been fighting hard for this spot, it was a challenge," she says. "I wouldn't have gone to the Olympic trials if I didn't want to wrestle on that stage and try to get a medal for my country."

Nordhagen will be joined on the Canadian women's team by Lyndsay Belisle of Hazelton, B.C., (48 kg), Tonya Verbeek of Beamsville, Ont., (55kg) and Viola Yanik of Saskatoon (63 kg).

"I'm so lucky because there's so many athletes that are in the same position I am, where they've put in so much time," says Nordhagen. "People don't realize how much time and effort are put into getting to this position."

In Nordhagen's 72-kilogram class, her stiffest competition is expected to come from Kyoko Hamaguchi of Japan - a five-time world champion - and 21-year-old American Toccara Montgomery, who is a two-time world silver medallist, including in 2001 when she lost to Nordhagen in the final.

Nordhagen is coming off recent victories at the Canada Cup and Austrian Ladies Open but did lose to Montgomery at the Titan Games in Atlanta in June.

"I know that I can beat everyone in my weight class, I've done it," she says. "There are a few girls that I haven't wrestled before but I've won way more tournaments than they have and I'm ranked higher. With the tough girls that are out there, I've beaten them all."

Specifically, she remembers a World Cup event last fall when she defeated Hamaguchi in front of her home fans in Japan.

"She'd just won the worlds like a month earlier and I was saying to myself 'I'm the underdog, she's the world champ,"' Nordhagen recalls. "I felt really excited about having that opportunity to wrestle the world champ and then beating her in her own country.

"It was a satisfying feeling."

Nordhagen also has an incredibly positive mental attitude, especially during the big matches.

"I'm really good at finding a good space when I'm at an international competition or a world championship," she says. "A lot of times I have a smile on my face. I enjoy it, it's exciting to be out there, to be competing with all these people watching."

In Athens, one of those people will be Vierling, who is the head coach of the Canadian women's team.

"He's a great coach," Nordhagen says of her husband, a former Greco-Roman wrestler. "Of course there are challenges when you're married to your coach. I think the hardest part for us is that it's hard to get away from it. He's so passionate about the sport and if he's thinking about it, he wants to talk about it. And I might not want to talk about it."

Nordhagen concedes Athens will be her one and only shot at the Olympics - she'll be 37 when Beijing rolls around - but she's not calling it her swan song. She's hoping to continue competing long enough to participate in next year's world championships.

And, after teaching for a few years, she's also wondering about a career change.

"It's such an important job and you have to want to be there," she says. "It's not one of the jobs that you just go in and say 'Oh I hate my job' and do it anyway. It's not fair to the kids.

"There's other things I'd like to try," she says. "I'm just keeping my options open."

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Rival a ring-a-ding-dong dandy

By ERIC FRANCIS, Calgary Sun 8/8/04

Stampede Wrestling fans know better than anybody no wrestling match was safe from chicanery when Animal Hamaguchi was ringside. However, when the legendary Japanese wrestler shows up at the Ano Liossia Olympic Hall for the inaugural Olympic women's wrestling tourney, Christine Nordhagen-Vierling needn't worry about referee interference or foreign objects.

He's simply there to cheer on his daughter, five-time world champ Kyoko Hamaguchi, who may very well face the Calgary resident in what would be a marquee gold-medal showdown.

"We've been back and forth over the years," said Nordhagen-Vierling, a six-time world champ who is 3-3 against the Japanese star.

"In 2003, she won the world championships. I beat her a month later but it'll be interesting to see how she handles the pressure. Kyoko is the flag-bearer for Japan, so I can't imagine the pressure she's feeling.

"I was in Jasper training last week and a film crew came up from Japan to film me just because I'm 'the rival' to Kyoko Hamaguchi. They're investing a lot of time and money into her winning at the Olympics."

Following his retirement in 1990, Heigo (Animal) Hamaguchi has been his 26-year-old daughter's full-time coach. His name was a household one in Calgary in the mid-'70s when he teamed with Mr. Hito to take on the likes of Bret and Keith Hart, a rivalry that was renewed years later in Japan.

"He was the hardest-working guy on the card every night," recalled Keith.

"High-flying moves off the rope -- just the kind of stuff my dad (promoter Stu Hart) loved. They had a Japanese ritual of throwing salt in their corner and stomping the mat before the match and they always had a little extra pouch of salt to rub into their opponents' eyes when things got tough."

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Now that's real girl power Local Olympian Christine Nordhagen-Vierling hopes to pin down a gold medal to cap her amazing wrestling odyssey

By ERIC FRANCIS, CALGARY SUN 8/8/04

Batting her chestnut brown eyes and flashing a cover-girl grin that reveals perfect teeth, Christine Nordhagen-Vierling makes a startling admission. "I don't like conflict," says the 33-year-old Calgary resident.

"I'm super-passive. I don't like to argue. I'm not a fighter. But on the mat ..."

It is there the photogenic product of tiny Valhalla Centre, Alta., (pop. 57, located

50 km outside Grande Prairie) morphs into a force that has seen her become the winningest female wrestler in the history of the sport.

A six-time world champ and 10-time national title holder, Nordhagen-Vierling will soon get her one and only chance to take possession of the only wrestling title she has yet to lay claim to -- Olympic gold.

A true pioneer of the only Olympic sport to make its debut in this year's five-ring circus, Nordhagen-Vierling is one of Canada's best medal hopes despite taking the 'mean' out of demeanour.

"Because I'm so not into conflict, maybe the mat is where I let it all out," laughs the part-time teacher from Ernest Manning high school.

"When I'm wrestling, I'm a bit mean at times. You have to be. I don't do anything illegal but there's 'the line.' Like when you've got to get someone's head down, you don't punch them but you give them a pretty good forearm. I don't have a problem with that."

Since she first dabbled in the sport

13 years ago at a six-week wrestling course at the U of A, Nordhagen-Vierling hasn't had much of a problem with anything, parlaying her curiosity into a wrestling odyssey that has not only taken her around the world but introduced her to her coach and eventual husband, Leigh Vierling, a former national team wrestler.

"Growing up, I loved wrestling around with friends. It was instinct," says Nordhagen-Vierling, who grew up on a farm.

"But there was no opportunity. I was surprised after the course, the instructor asked if I wanted to wrestle.

" 'Women don't wrestle.' That was my answer."

As it turned out, the first Canadian national female championships were being staged seven months later and she suddenly found herself training with purpose.

"I just happened to be in the right place at the right time," says Nordhagen-Vierling, who claimed the Canadian 68kg title that year, starting a streak that saw her go undefeated on Canadian soil for close to a decade.

Crediting life on the farm for teaching her the importance of might, Nordhagen-Vierling remembers having to lead a 1,400-lb. steer around a ring as part of her 4H experience as a 10-year-old.

"You get dragged around a corral or it smacks you into a fence but you just keep going," laughs the

5-ft. 7-in., 160-lb. wrestler, who grew up with four siblings.

"My parents weren't around to supervise, so you fended for yourself. You didn't take turns -- the strongest got their way."

That was evident one night in particular when an after-school dispute with her younger brother Colin turned into a memorable battle royale.

"He is two years younger but we were about the same size growing up, so we fought all the time," she says, laughing.

"We only had two channels and that night I think it was Three's Company and Wheel of Fortune. I didn't really care what we watched but I just didn't want him to have his way. He got to watch his show the day before, so it was my day.

"We had a battle in the living- room that lasted a half hour. Click, fight, fight, fight, click ... that was my first match."

Did she win?

"It was a tie," she laughs. "Actually, we both lost because neither one of us got to watch our show."

Losses have been few and far between for Nordhagen-Vierling -- that is, up until two years ago when a lifetime of bumps made the simple act of crouching an excruciating experience. Arthritic knees and a series of other ailments forced her to take 2002 off, making for a 2003 comeback that saw her face newfound adversity.

She lost more matches that year than she had her entire life.

Thinking back, if the IOC hadn't announced in 2001 women's wrestling would make its Olympic debut in Athens, she probably would have quit. Her career saved by a lubricant painfully injected under her kneecaps every four months, Nordhagen-Vierling is confident she can beat any of the 11 wrestlers in the 72kg competition. She's already beaten all of the opponents she has faced, including current world champ Kyoko Hamaguchi, who she recently defeated. Still, the pressure of competing at the Olympics has the even-keeled wrestler on an emotional roller-coaster.

"Usually, I'm super-positive and I'm trying my best but right now I have the worst attitude of my life ever -- this Olympic thing has been very challenging," says the second-oldest Olympic competitor in her sport.

"It's been really tough to believe in yourself. Sometimes I don't handle it well and start crying in the middle of practice because I want it so bad. It's been a struggle. My Olympic trials, I bawled uncontrollably. I've never done that before."

They were the same tears that flowed at the Pan-Am Games in Winnipeg as she watched her husband in the opening ceremonies.

"I was crying because I was so proud of him but I also felt a little sad because I wanted on opportunity to do that," says Nordhagen-Vierling, who will finally get her chance.

"This will be awesome. I can't imagine. I'll try to be tough about it but I don't think I'll be able to. I'm going to let it go and enjoy it all."

Don't let her looks or sensitivity fool you -- she's as tough as they come.

And she has no interest in arguing about it.

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Grappling with issue of gender barrier U.S. women wrestlers are 'pioneers'

By Rich Hammond
Staff Writer 8/7/04

At first, Terry Steiner didn't know if he could handle all of it, including the sexist comments, jokes and quips from colleagues who believed the wrestling mat was no place for women.

In the spring of 2002, Steiner had been offered the chance to be the first coach of the United States women's wrestling team, and Steiner needed to figure out if he wanted to commit to a sport that long had been ridiculed by his fellow men's college coaches.

"When I was trying to make the decision, my wife said, 'You have to believe in this because you have to be their advocate,' and I didn't know if I could do that," Steiner said. "She said, 'What if your daughter wanted to follow in your footsteps? Would you want her to have to go through the same things that these girls are going through?' Then I started looking at it a little differently.

"It took me awhile to change my attitude. Ultimately, I had to ask myself the question, 'Why do I coach?' I really believe in the sport of wrestling and what it teaches, and the conclusion I came to is that if I really believe in the sport, why should it matter if I'm coaching men or women? If it's such a great sport, why do we want to hold it to half of the population?"

Steiner took the job in April 2002, and this month he will lead the first U.S. women's wrestling delegation to Athens, Greece. The trip won't just be about breaking a gender barrier, however, as all four team members would seem to have solid chances to win medals.

Patricia Miranda (105.5 pounds), Tela O'Donnell (121), Sara McCann (138.75) and Toccara Montgomery (158.5) will be among the favorites in their respective weight classes, and their stiffest competition likely will come from Japan, which also has been progressive in women's wrestling in recent years.

Women's wrestling was the only sport to be added to the Games after 2000. Although women's wrestling is still considered a niche sport, its international profile has increased significantly since then and will only grow with the exposure in Athens.

"I don't want to put too much pressure on our women, but having them do well could definitely be a catalyst for our sport," said Steiner, who also competed at the University of Iowa.

"I want those girls to walk out of there with their heads high, no matter what. It's exciting, just to be a part of this because they are a great group of people and a great group of athletes. They're the pioneers of the sport, so no matter what happens, they're the first Olympians."

That fact makes men like Kent Bailo beam with pride.

Bailo, who has a full-time job in the automotive industry in Michigan, is one of the forefathers of women's wrestling. In 1997, when the sport had little national credibility, Bailo, a longtime referee, staged his first state tournament for high school girls so, he said, "girls could find out how good they were."

The annual tournament, organized by Bailo's United States Girls Wrestling Association, gained momentum and suddenly girls from across the country signed up. Three of the four Olympians won at Bailo's tournament, and Miranda couldn't compete because she had already graduated from high school.

"Hopefully this exposure will help the sport," Bailo said. "Let's say there will be 20 million little girls sitting home with mom and dad when one of these four girls wins a gold medal. These little girls will say, 'I didn't know girls could wrestle. I want to be like Toccara. I want to do that, dad,' and how are the parents going to hold them back? These women could become media darlings."

The sport certainly needs some promotion. Only seven colleges, none of them with major athletic programs, have women's wrestling teams, so most women compete with the men, as they do in high school. One of the biggest problems is a battle within the sport.

Many men's wrestling programs were cut nationwide as college athletic directors attempted to comply with Title IX -- the civil rights legislation that requires schools to offer equal opportunity for men and women or risk losing federal funding -- so there has been a backlash against the notion of adding even more women's teams.

"Women's wrestling definitely has a way to go," Steiner said, "because not only is it trying to get respect as a mainstream sport, but it's also trying to get respect within its own sport.

"There are some high school and college coaches who just don't agree with the idea of it, and that's the attitude that we're trying to change. We're never going to do anything without the coaches because they're the ones who need to create the opportunities at the grassroots level."

It's happening slowly. Bailo and Steiner compared women's wrestling at this stage to how women's basketball was at the outset, and Bailo said he looks forward to the day when his organization is no longer needed, when girls nationwide have the ability to compete against each other.

"These women are telling us, 'We don't want you to give anything to us, we just want the opportunity to get what (the men) get if we work as hard as they do,' " Bailo said.

In that way, consider Athens the first step in a long, but rewarding, process.

Rich Hammond, (818) 713-3611 rich.hammond@dailynews.com

WRESTLING
Medal picks:
MEN:
Greco-Roman 121 pounds:
G -- Lazaro Rivas, Cuba
S -- Dae-Won Im, South Korea
B -- Hasan Rangraz, Iran. 132
G -- Armen Nazarian, Bulgaria
S -- Jim Gruenwald, U.S.
B -- Roberto Monzon, Cuba. 145
G -- Manuchari Kvirkvelia, Georgia
S -- Kim In-Sub, South Korea
B -- Armen Vardanyan, Ukraine. 163
G -- Alexei Gloushkov, Russia
S -- Jin Soo Kim, South Korea
B -- Filberto Azcuy, Cuba. 185
G -- Alexei Michin, Russia
S -- Ara Abrahamian, Sweden
B -- Hamza Yerlikaya, Turkey. 211
G -- Ramaz Nozadze, Georgia
S -- Ernesto Pena, Cuba
B -- Karam Mohammed Gaber, Egypt. 264
G -- Rulon Gardner, U.S.
S -- Khassan Baroev, Russia
B -- Mihaly Deak-Bardos, Hungary.

Freestyle 121 pounds
G -- Dilshod Mansurov, Uzbekistan
S -- Namik Abdullaev, Azerbaijan
B -- Roberto Montero, Cuba. 132
G -- Mourad Oumachanov, Russia
S -- Purevbaatar Oyunbuleg, Mongolia
B -- Yandro Quintana, Cuba. 145
G -- Serafim Barzakov, Bulgaria
S -- Irbek Farniev, Russia
B -- Ali Reza Dabir, Iran. 163
G -- Bouvaisa Saitiev, Russia
S -- Mourad Gaidarov, Belarus
B -- Gennadi Laliev, Kazakhstan. 185
G -- Cael Sanderson, U.S.
S -- Adam Saitiev, Russia
B -- Yoel Romero, Cuba. 211
G -- Alireza Heidari, Iran
S -- Eldari Kurtanidze, Georgia
B -- Krassimir Kotchev, Bulgaria. 264
G -- David Musulbes, Russia
S -- Artur Taymazov, Uzbekistan
B -- Kerry McCoy, U.S.

WOMEN

Freestyle 105 pounds

G -- Irina Melnik, Ukraine
S -- Chiharu Icho, Japan
B -- Patricia Miranda, U.S. 121
G -- Saori Yoshida, Japan
S -- Na-Lae Lee, South Korea
B -- Natalia Golts, Russia. 138
G -- Sara McMann, U.S.
S -- Kaori Icho, Japan
B -- Lili Meng, China. 158
G -- Kyoko Hamaguchi, Japan
S -- Toccara Montgomery, U.S.
B -- Xu Wang, China.

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PATRICIA MIRANDA

Women's Wrestling
A brand-new sport for women usually means a medals windfall for America. Five-foot, 102-pound Patricia Miranda hopes to grab the first gold in women's wrestling, the only new Olympic competition in Athens. At Stanford, she wrestled on the men's team, taking daily beatings in practice from her bigger, stronger teammates. That helped produce a wrestler many regard as the toughest on the U.S. team—of either gender. At the 2003 World Championships, Miranda lost the gold by a point to the Ukrainian world champ. "I cried, it was so painful," she says. "But it was a kick in the a-- to help me win in Athens."
FYI: Eli bookworms beware: Miranda is headed to Yale Law School.

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