CEDAR CITY — Olympic gold medalist Rulon Gardner took to the podium at a recent luncheon hosted by Cedar City’s Chamber of Commerce Thursday to share how he became a champion and survivor.

Gardner said growing up on a dairy farm in Wyoming taught him hard work, but due to a learning disability, he often struggled at school.

In high school, a wrestling coach talked to Gardner about success.

“‘I see something special,” he says. ‘If you give 100% and give your very best, you’re going to succeed,” Gardner explained. “I’m like, ‘What is succeeding though?'”

His high school advisers told him he would not succeed in becoming a physical education teacher and that he would fail his college courses. His mother, however, encouraged him to continue, he said.

“And she (said), ‘how dare they determine who you are, where you’re from and what you can do? The only person that will determine your destiny is you,'” Gardner said.

Gardner was later recruited by the Ricks College wrestling team, despite losing a match with the scout in attendance. He asked the head wrestling coach why he was chosen.

“‘I knew you had something special,’ (the coach) said. ‘With two seconds left in that match you still believed you could win, so of course that’s why. Most people would quit,'” Gardner explained.

Taking down a champion

In 2000, Gardner joined the United States Olympic Greco-Roman wrestling team. Gardner’s opponent, Aleksandr Karelin from Russia, had never lost an international match and was described as “perhaps the most feared athlete in Olympic history,” according to a video shown at the luncheon.

Gardner previously wrestled Karelin in the 1997 World Championship semifinals, losing 5-0. Karelin dropped him on his head multiple times, breaking two vertebrae in Gardner’s neck.

“I was in a complete disadvantage,” Gardner said. “It wasn’t fair. It was evil, Karelin was bigger, stronger, but it didn’t matter. I had a choice. Do I give 100% effort or just realize, ‘look, give up, lose to the best.’ I’ve never backed down from a fight.”

In training, Gardner wrestled for up to two hours at a time, which he said helped him win against larger wrestlers.

“You can’t physically beat that,” Gardner said. “But what you can do is, you’re going outlast him, you can tire him out, you can exhaust him because he wasn’t used to wrestling those two-hour matches. So the longer the match went, the better opportunity you had.”

To demonstrate the final moments of the match against Karelin, Gardner invited his friend and fellow Olympian, Bill Schuffenhauer, to the front of the room. The two men performed a body lock and Gardner picked Schuffenhauer off the ground.

“So, what Karelin did is, he locked up,” Gardner said. “So when we do it, I have a choice. I can either take him straight to the mat. I take him down to the mat, for one, or I break his hands, fleeing the hold. Or I take him out of balance because wrestling is about territory.”

Gardner won the match and the gold medal by breaking out of Karelin’s grasp.

Near-death in Wyoming

Gardner related how in 2002 he fell into the Salt River on his snowmobile in Star Valley, Wyoming.. He was stranded in wet clothes and no coat in 25-degree weather for 18 hours. He said he had visions of God, Jesus and his brother who had died, “calling him home.”

Thoughts of his mom helped him push through.

“The reason I didn’t die is my mom was with me. If you’ve ever seen ‘The Shining’ with Jack Nicholson at the end of the movie where they find them frozen to death, the vision of me being being frozen to death and my mom finding me …  wouldn’t allow me to quit on myself.”

Gardner was rescued and transferred to a hospital, suffering from hypothermia and frostbite, he said. His feet were frozen into his boots and doctors told Gardner they might require amputation.

Gardner’s feet were later treated with pressurized oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber, which increased blood flow to the tissue, Gardner said.

“We did that for a month. My feet started to heal,” he said. “In June I started to wear shoes. In July, I started to actually walk on it.”

In 2004, Gardner returned to the Olympics, bringing home the bronze medal.

More recently, Gardner competed on the TV show “The Biggest Loser,” losing 173 pounds. In 2005 he published his autobiography, “Never Stop Pushing: My Life from a Wyoming Farm to the Olympic Medals Stand.”

Gardner was the head wrestling coach at Herriman High School but made the move to Southern Utah to work with local wrestlers. Additionally, he operates Rulon Gardner’s Gold Medal Gym, a youth wrestling club.

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.