Never Stop Pushing by Rulon Gardner

Author:Rulon Gardner [RULON GARDNER WITH BOB SCHALLER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2012-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

WHO AM I NOW?

MY FEET WERE soaking wet and I was shivering.

I hadn’t slept in twenty hours, and I had no idea where I was. I shook my head and sat up in the water.

Trying to get up, I nearly fell. The water was unbelievably cold, and the shivering was getting worse. My body hurt from head to toe.

I was in the bathtub in my room at the Olympic Village in Sydney, Australia.

“Come to Sydney to catch hypothermia!” I jokingly asked myself after waking up from an hourlong nap in the bathtub.

But what was I doing here? During an hour in the tub, I had dreamed that I had beaten Russian legend Alexander Karelin to win the gold medal. Carefully, I got out of the tub. Every body part hurt, and I could barely move my legs. I wrapped a towel around myself and dried off with two other towels.

“If it’s true that I beat Karelin, the gold medal will be sitting on my bed,” I told myself.

I hurried out to my room, and there it was on the bed: the gold medal for winning the heavyweight championship at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney

The special ed survivor, finally, was as good as gold.

As the first twenty-four hours after the match unfolded and America caught up with what had happened at 3:00 A.M. Mountain Time, things started to blur. I talked to more and more media, yet the requests for more interviews were coming in at the speed of light. I went to a USA Wrestling party at a venue right next to the Olympic Stadium and visited with everyone. They were going nuts. Seeing all my friends and family so happy was really cool. KSL, the TV station out of Salt Lake City that had come to follow me, did a twenty-minute interview with me that night. They flew around the world to follow me, one of the bigger longshots at the Games—what a sell that must’ve been to the person who signed the expense check! The least I could do was give them all the time they needed; I knew it was their station that my neighbors in Star Valley would be watching.

I went to track star Michael Johnson’s Olympic party at Sydney’s Planet Hollywood, and then did an interview with CNN. I went on the radio with ESPN’s Dan Patrick—it was in the early hours of the morning in Australia, but it was daytime in the United States, where Mr. Patrick’s radio show was being broadcast. That was a lot of fun.

At 5:30 A.M., I headed back to my room to go to bed. After falling asleep in the bathtub, I woke up and realized that what had seemed like a dream—what was too good to be true—was reality.

My plan had been to go back to America the next day. But I was told that I might be the flagbearer for the Closing Ceremonies. The flagbearer is chosen by athlete vote and they had voted for me. What an honor.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.