ALL THAT IS GOLD DOES NOT GLITTER
After her triumph at the Rio Olympics, Erica Wiebe has experienced the weird world of wrestling celebrity and something of a competitive lull. Now she’s drawing on her inner strength, heading back to the mats and setting her sights on Tokyo 2020.
After her triumph at the Rio Olympics, Erica Wiebe has experienced the weird world of wrestling celebrity and something of a competitive lull. Now she’s drawing on her inner strength, heading back to the mats and setting her sights on Tokyo 2020.
All Erica Wiebe remembers about stepping on the wrestling mat for her final match was licking her lips and noticing they were very salty. The entire day had been a blur. Wiebe had bulldozed her way through the Olympic tournament in Rio, conceding only a single takedown in her four straight wins. Now she would wrestle for gold. Her Kazakh opponent, though, didn’t put up much of a fight, and Wiebe trounced her 6-0. Wiebe had become Olympic Champion.
In the first seconds after the final buzzer, Wiebe hardly reacted. She dropped her hands to her side and barely even smiled. She seemed more bewildered than joyful when the referee raised her arm. Soon, though, the realization of what she had accomplished washed over her. Wiebe lifted a Canadian flag above her head, her tongue joyously wagging out of her mouth, then she hoisted her coach, Paul Ragusa, onto her shoulders and piggybacked him around the mat. Later, Wiebe said, “I really wanted to recognize Paul in that moment, because he had done so much for me and he was the reason I got there. That’s why I put him on my shoulders.”
From his perch, Ragusa thought less about Wiebe’s victory that day than about the decade of training that had made it possible. “She had done everything she needed to do,” Ragusa said. He was proud of her. But he also thought about the weeks and months that lay ahead for Wiebe. Ragusa has been part of nearly every Canadian Olympic wrestling team since 1992 as an athlete, training partner or coach. He knows better than anyone the challenges athletes face following the Olympics.
In the years leading up to the Games, a wrestler’s life is planned down to the most minute detail. She attends twice-daily practice sessions to perfect her technique. Coaches design specialized training blocks that peak and taper before important competitions. She travels abroad to tournaments and training camps around the world. She undergoes regular strength and fitness testing. She scouts her opponents and monitors her nutrition. A crew of coaches, workout partners, sports-medicine doctors, athletic trainers and psychologists assemble around her for the sole purpose of readying her to step onto the Olympic mats. “We are there to babysit their minds during that time, too,” Ragusa said. “It takes a village to raise an Olympian.”
Then, suddenly, the final whistle blows and it is all over. Those obsessively planned days are done and the village disperses. For the first time in years, the athlete has nothing to do. “They feel lost,” Ragusa said. “They wonder what they are going to do with the rest of their life.” A gold medal can further complicate the post-Olympics drift. The flood of interview requests, event invitations, speaking engagements, and sponsorship opportunities can distract and overwhelm newly minted champions. “There is always a crash,” Ragusa said. He didn’t know when or how the crash would come for Wiebe, but he knew it would.
Wiebe returned to Canada a media darling. She represented part of Canada’s overachieving women’s Olympic team that claimed 16 of the country’s 22 medals in Rio, and her gregariousness made her a marketer’s dream. Wiebe was game for anything. Prairie Toyota featured her in a “Free Ride” commercial. She attended a Toronto International Film Festival gala, visited Canadian
“I was faced with the reality of going back to just training again. And wrestling is f---ing hard.” — Erica Wiebe
“She always trained hard when she was in the room, but it was hard to rein her in.” —Paul Ragusa, Wiebe’s coach
troops overseas, dropped the puck at an Ottawa Senators game, and did countless speaking engagements across the country. Wiebe would often run into fellow Rio gold-medallists Rosie MacLennan and Derek Drouin at these events, and they would tease her for saying yes to everything.
Ragusa wanted Wiebe to take a long break to immerse herself in her well-earned celebrity. She clearly enjoyed the spotlight and there was no rush to get back on the mat. She could take a whole year off if she wanted. Carol Huynh, another of Ragusa’s wrestlers, didn’t compete at all in the year following her gold medal at the 2008 Olympics and went on to win a bronze at the 2012 Games. But Wiebe wanted to keep wrestling. “I felt so amazing,” she said. Wiebe told Ragusa she intended to wrestle at National Championships in the spring. Winning nationals would earn her the right to compete for Canada at the World Championships in Paris the following August. Ragusa signed on. “It was my job to get her ready,” he said.
After a few weeks travelling for events, though, the thought of returning to the wrestling room full time started to lose its appeal for Wiebe. “I was faced with the reality of going back to just training again,” she said. “And wrestling is f---ing hard.” During her first practice five weeks after the Games, Wiebe’s training partner accidentally elbowed her in the face and broke her tooth. “I was bleeding and I had chipped teeth in my mouth and I thought ‘Why the f--- am I doing this to myself ?’” Wiebe sought out advice from other Olympic champions about how they’d dealt with their post-gold-medal years. “Some people took time off, and wished they didn’t. Others didn’t take time off and wished they did.” Wiebe wasn’t sure what to do.
In January 2017, Wiebe accepted an invitation to participate in India’s glitzy, and lucrative, Pro Wrestling League. The threeweek competition featured both Indian wrestlers and high-profile “internationals” like Wiebe on six teams. League wrestling followed the same freestyle rules of competitions like the Olympic Games, but with all the bright lights, loud music, and pyrotechnics of a WWE event. The teams competed against each other in dual meets in front of 6,000 raucous spectators—far more than had watched Wiebe’s gold medal match in Rio or anywhere else. Wiebe was the second-highest-paid wrestler in the league, the captain of Mumbai Maharathi, and a fan favourite. The Indian media nicknamed her “the Tigress.”
As captain, Wiebe took on the responsibility of motivating her fellow Maharathi. She held team meetings in her Delhi hotel room where she pumped them up with locker roomstyle pep talks. The team manager had to translate Wiebe’s words into Hindi for the Indian wrestlers, one of whom translated them into the Haryanvi dialect for a wrestler from India’s Haryana state. An English-speaking Ukrainian teammate translated Wiebe’s speeches into Russian for a wrestler from Azerbaijan. Then Wiebe would repeat her entire talk, slowly, in broken English for a Colombian wrestler on the team. The meetings took a while.
Wiebe’s weight class was the toughest in the league and included former Olympic and World medallists. Few, though, took their proleague matches seriously and nobody trained
“I was bleeding and I had chipped teeth in my mouth and I thought ‘Why the f--- am I doing this to myself?’ ” —Wiebe
very hard. For all the fun and flash, her Indian experience left her unprepared for her first important post-Olympic tournament, the Klippan Lady Open. When she stepped onto the mat in Sweden, Wiebe had only had about 10 days of proper training. She was rusty and, according to Ragusa, completely unfocused.
Wiebe reached the finals where she faced fellow Canadian Justine Di Stasio, one of her perennial rivals. Di Stasio scored on Wiebe early in the match. Then again. And again. The crowd, sensing an upset, started to cheer for Di Stasio. With two minutes left, Di Stasio was pummelling Wiebe 9-0, only one point away from winning the match by technical superiority. Wiebe, though, came back and scored seven straight points before losing 107. “If there was another minute in the match, I would’ve won,” Wiebe said. Her near comeback testified to Wiebe’s fierce competitiveness. Still, she was disappointed.
The Klippan final represented Wiebe’s first loss as Olympic champion—an important milestone, according to Ragusa. For gold medallists, losing a match feels both forbidden and inevitable. Athletes obsess about the prospect of their first post-Olympics defeat, and fret about when and how it will happen. Ragusa would have preferred Wiebe lose to an international athlete rather than to one of her Canadian rivals, but getting that first loss out of the way was important. “There was a big letdown,” Ragusa said, “but also a big release.”
Wiebe stayed in Sweden for an optional post-tournament training camp. A few weeks later, she competed in Ukraine, where she stayed with one of her former Maharathi teammates. Wiebe won the tournament, but tore the fascia in her foot in the process. Then, in the days before the Canadian National Championships in March, Wiebe broke two ribs and wasn’t able to compete. Justine Di Stasio replaced Wiebe on the national team. Acknowledging Wiebe’s injury, Wrestling Canada scheduled a “wrestle-off ” between Wiebe and Di Stasio to be held in July to determine who would represent Canada at the World Championships in Paris. This would give Wiebe’s ribs a chance to heal and time to get her training back on track.
Ragusa, though, could tell Wiebe’s priorities lay elsewhere. Her public events seemed to come at the most inopportune times—in the middle of a training block or at the same time as an important competition. Instead of wrestling at the Grand Prix of Germany, for example, Wiebe flew to Iceland to be part of Gold Medal Plates, a fundraiser for Canadian athletes. “I could sense her wavering,” Ragusa said, and her apparent lack of commitment frustrated him. “She always trained hard when she was in the room,” Ragusa said, “but it wasn’t easy to rein her in.” Ragusa told Wiebe that in order to be successful again, she needed to stop being Olympic champion. “Erica had to go back to being a schmo athlete,” Ragusa said. “She had to get back to the grind.”
Wiebe wasn’t ready for the grind, at least not yet. She knew what it took to be the best in the world—she’d won the Olympics, after all— but in the wake of all the exciting travel and other opportunities, she wasn’t sure she could do it. “I didn’t know if I could push myself as hard as I pushed myself last year,” Wiebe said. “I looked in the mirror and asked myself if I was ready to go to the World Championships and be the best that I could. I wasn’t.” Wiebe forfeited her wrestle-off with Di Stasio the night before their scheduled match.
She knew she had disappointed Ragusa. Wiebe had hoisted her coach onto her shoulders in Rio’s gold-medal afterglow because she needed him to feel her gratitude. She wanted to acknowledge all he had done for her in the years leading up to the Games, and wanted their athlete-coach bond to continue. But the post-Olympic pressures had taken a toll on their relationship. “It sucks to let him down,” Wiebe said. For his part, Ragusa felt he let Wiebe down, too. He should have realized Wiebe wasn’t prepared to keep up the pace of a top athlete in Rio’s wake, he said—not with everything else she was being offered. “I should have let her off the hook,” he said.
After her missed wrestle-off with Di Stasio, and without the pressure of the World Championships looming over her, Wiebe returned to her regular training schedule with a renewed intensity and commitment. At first, Ragusa was surprised to see her in the wrestling room nearly every day. “Maybe this was her way of working things out,” he said.
Wiebe had one more adventure to go on, though. In September, she accepted an invitation to audition for the WWE at its training facility in Florida. Like most amateur wrestlers, Wiebe had spent years explaining to people that her style of wrestling is not the same as the ropes-and-ring spectacles they see on television. She appreciated the irony of her visit to the WWE, but this was the sort of adventure that she could hardly turn down. Talent scouts arranged a practice session where Wiebe learned a few rudimentary manoeuvres. She also learned how WWE matches are structured according to a set of preordained plot points, and how “opponents” assist each other in the ring to look good and keep safe. Wiebe enjoyed her time in Florida, but she is not ready to trade in her Team Canada singlet for the bedazzled bikinis of the WWE. Her priorities are clear. She intends to defend her Olympic gold at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
And Wiebe finally seems ready to put in the work. She has gone back to being a “schmo athlete,” just as Ragusa had hoped. Wiebe ground out a tournament win in Calgary in October, and, last month, won a spot on Canada’s 2018 Commonwealth Games team. The road to Tokyo is long. Soon, though, the village of coaches, training partners and doctors will reassemble. The hours on the mat will amass, one workout and one match at a time. Ragusa sees a golden future for Wiebe. “She has the potential to lay down a real legacy,” he said. Now he wonders if Wiebe needed to work through a year’s worth of injuries, distractions, and disappointments to prepare her for whatever will come next. “Maybe we needed to go through all of that to get where we are now,” he said. Either way, Erica Wiebe is back.