PARIS — Over the past four years, Sarah Hildebrandt has established herself as one of the best wrestlers in the world in her weight class. She won a bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics. Then silver at the 2021 world championships. Then another bronze, at worlds. Then another.
Yet on Wednesday night, Hildebrandt wasn’t one of the best. She was the best.
And the Olympic gold medal draped around her neck was proof.
Hildebrandt gave Team USA its second wrestling gold medal in as many nights at the 2024 Paris Olympics, defeating Yusneylys Guzmán of Cuba, 3-0, in the 50-kilogram final at Champ-de-Mars Arena. It is the 30-year-old’s first senior title at the Olympics or world championships – the gold medal she’s been chasing after disappointment in Tokyo.
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Hildebrandt’s path to the gold was not without drama as her original opponent, Vinesh Phogat of India, failed to make weight Wednesday morning despite taking drastic measures overnight, including even cutting her hair. The Indian Olympic Association said she missed the 50-kilogram cutoff by just 100 grams, which is about 0.22 pounds.
So instead, Hildebrandt faced Guzmán, whom she had walloped 10-0 at last year’s Pan-American Championships. And she won again.
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Her gold came roughly 24 hours after Amit Elor also won her Olympic final. Those two join Helen Maroulis and Tamyra Mensah-Stock as the only American women to earn Olympic titles since 2004, when women’s wrestling was added to the Olympic program.
Hildebrandt grew up in Granger, Indiana and, like many of the women on Team USA, she spent part of her early days wrestling against boys.
Unlike other wrestlers, however, she had another unique opponent: Her own mother. Hildebrandt explained at the U.S. Olympic trials earlier this year that, during early-morning training sessions with her coach, her mother would come along per school policy. Because the coach was too large for Hildebrandt to practice her moves, she ended up enlisting her mom, Nancy, instead.
‘This sweet woman let me beat her up at 5:30 in the morning, for the sake of my improvement,’ she told the Olympic Information Service.
Hildebrandt went on to win a junior national title, then wrestle collegiately at King University in Bristol, Tennessee. Before long, she was making world teams for Team USA and winning international competitions like the Pan-American Championships, which she has now won seven times.
It all led to Tokyo, where Hildebrandt was a strong contender to win gold but missed out on the final in devastating fashion. She had a two-point lead with just 12 seconds left in her semifinal bout against Sun Yanan of China, but a late step out of bounds and takedown doomed her to the bronze medal match, which she won.
Hildebrandt has since said that she didn’t take enough time to process the emotions of that loss. She tried to confront that grief and also revisit some of her preparation heading into Paris.
‘I was really hard-headed, stubborn to a fault,’ she said at the U.S. Olympic trials. ‘I wasn’t listening to my body. Just trained through walls because I thought that’s what it took. It’s taken a lot to step back from that and just be like ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we’re good, we put in the work the last 20 years, we can listen to our body.”
Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on social media @Tom_Schad.
