Heavyweight star completes arduous comeback
When it was over, when Erica Wiebe had wrestled a perfect match on a perfect day and had secured the gold medal, she fell to her knees on the mat at Carioca Arena.
She held a Canadian flag in her hands and buried her face in the mat. When she got up, tears streamed down her face.
Wiebe, 27, said it was a release of all the hard work and disappointment that had got her this far. The latest in a line of Canadian heavyweight wrestling stars — but who suffered a surprise loss at the nationals last year and whose confidence was gone — Wiebe said the process to climb back was long and tough. It included six stitches and a broken tooth in just the past few months.
“Wrestling is not fun,” she said. “For me, competing for a long time was not fun. I put so much pressure on myself, I knew I was good and I put so much pressure on myself to wrestle a certain way, to be a certain way, the pressure of being an Olympian, even.”
“In the weeks leading up to this I shed that pressure. I’m still the same person and I don’t have to be any certain way other than the way I am,” she said, her voice breaking. “And so I just went after it.”
After a series of wins put her in the 75 kg gold-medal final, Wiebe, from Stittsville, Ont. by way of the University of Calgary, handled her Kazakh opponent, Guzel Manyurova, with what looked like relative ease. She wore her opponent out and countered three takedown attempts, scoring two points each time for a 6-0 win.
The strategy, she said, was simple: “Pressure her, break her, make her want to quit.”
Leigh Veirling, one of the Canadian coaches, said Manyurova looked exhausted by the end. “I think if (Wiebe) had blown on her, she would have fallen down,” he said.
She didn’t, but the win was convincing enough as it was.
After she watched the Canadian flag raised, and cried again a little and sung the national anthem, Wiebe met the media with a stunned look on her face. Not from the bout, but from the realization of what she had accomplished.
“I’m never at a loss for words, but I’ mat a complete loss for words right now,” she said. “I think I just gave it my everything today and what I did on the mat speaks for itself.”
Wiebe, who started wrestling at Stittsville’s Sacred Heart high school on something of a lark so she could get close to the boys on the team, took a minute to think about how far she had come. She missed out on the national team at London 2012, but went there as a training partner. This Olympic trip was rather more special.
“I really feel like I’m the same sil- ly Grade 9 girl who was like, ‘I want to do wrestling,’ ” Wiebe said with a giggle, which is not a sound you expect to hear from someone who just tossed an opponent around a mat for six minutes. “But to get this far, it has been quite the journey.”
Her coaches say the journey is far from over.
“She scratched the surface today,” said Paul Ragusa, who received a Wiebe bear hug and then a ride on her shoulders on the mat when the match was over. He said she wrestled conservatively, partly because the stage of an Olympic final was one where neither wrestler wanted to make mistakes .“You haven’ t seen anything from Erica yet.”
Wiebe was still trying to figure out how to put what she had done in words. “I woke up and I was just a random person, an everyday girl just trying to work hard and be my best today, and to have it end like this is amazing.”
From the failure of 18 months ago and the questioning of whether she wanted to keep going with the gruelling career — “I was really doubting myself last year,” she said — Wiebe put those thoughts behind her and it ended in the best possible way. Canada’s 16th medal in Rio — and fourth gold, the most since Barcelona in 1992. Another woman who rose to the occasion. It is, suddenly, a familiar script.
Wie be said she knew she had done all she could to prepare, so it was just a matter of not thinking about the stage. “The wrestling mat is the same size as the one I practise on every day, though there’s a little more lighting,” she said, with another little laugh and a smile. “I just went out there and wrestled. I had fun today.”
Gold medals will do that.