Zain Retherford's Olympic Dream, and the Sport That Won't Quit Us

Back in December 2023, Zain Retherford took a job at a New York City investment firm. In some ways, his path to this job was a typical one: he’d just finished his MBA at Penn State, the same school where he’d previously majored in finance as an undergraduate. But in one crucial way, Retherford’s story was decidedly atypical. Imagine Patrick Mahomes as an insurance salesman, or Kylian Mbappe as a software engineer—that’s the equivalent of Zain Retherford on Wall Street.

Retherford is nothing less than a world-class athlete, a Mahomes, an Mbappe. It’s just that he doesn’t draw 75,000 frenzied fans to Arrowhead Stadium; he doesn’t bask beneath the famous floodlights of Europe’s glittering capitals. Instead, he works his understated wonders in far obscurer outposts: sweaty gyms, small crowds, spotty TV broadcasts on paywall-protected websites. For all his generational talent, Retherford is relegated to such sporting shadows because he is a master of a shadow of a sport.

As a 149-pound wrestler at Penn State, Retherford won three NCAA national titles. He won the Hodge trophy—the Heisman of wrestling—twice. Once he graduated, he bumped up to 70 kilos (154.3 pounds) to win a silver medal at the 2022 World Championships and a gold in 2023—while also working on his aforementioned MBA. Retherford’s wrestling resume is as staggering as they come, but he’s still always had to hedge his vocational bets.

Though Retherford’s decision to pick up a second job might seem unique, he is far from the only wrestler to have found himself in this position. Two-time world medalist Andy Bisek made ends meet stocking beer in a liquor mart leading up to the 2016 Olympics, while U-23 national champion Carter Nielsen got his real estate license when the Covid pandemic interrupted his training regimen in 2020. And it practically goes without saying that most post-collegiate wrestlers draw most of their salary not from competing but from coaching, often at their alma mater and occasionally for an old rival. 

Such side-hustling is necessary because, despite efforts in the last decade to revamp the compensation model for elite wrestlers in America, wrestling remains a largely deprofessionalized sport, wreathed in its age-old tradition of Olympic amateurism and beset by its perpetual failures to hold the interest of the general sports-watching public. If you’re a top wrestler looking for pro-level money, you find it someplace else: you transition to the cartoonish choreographies of the WWE (“the spectacle of excess,” per Roland Barthes), or you steel yourself for the blood-stained brutalities of the UFC (“human cockfighting,” per John McCain). But if you crave a shot at that elusive Olympic gold, you’d better find yourself a day job to go along with it. 

All athletes, of course, exist on the precipice of no longer existing as athletes. Even Mahomes and Mbappe, those two titanic luminaries, cling to their immortal careers by only the tenuousness of their body’s weakest tendon. Wrestlers, however, with their Olympic hopes tied up in their part-time jobs, earn the bulk of their living by living their retirement. They are about-to-bes and has-beens, equally and at the same time.

So those were Retherford’s circumstances at his Wall Street job. He spent half of each workday at an asset manager’s desk, a preview of the rest of his life. But the other half of the day, he worked out. He thought about 2024, about Paris, about his final and only opportunity to become an Olympian, to do the one thing in the sport he had not yet done. He thought about what it would take. A daunting weight cut, down to the Olympic-certified 65 kilos (143.3 pounds), lower than he’d been even in his college days. A grueling weekend at the Olympic Trials, up against a bracket bristling with the country’s best wrestlers, all competing for a single spot on the US team. And after that—well, he’d think about that when he made it that far.

In January 2024, Retherford got in touch with his old coaches from Penn State. He was going to do it. 

In April, feeling fit at 65 kilos, he won the Trials, gutting out two close but commanding wins against a former teammate in the best-of-three finals. Retherford had secured his spot on the US Olympic team—but he wasn’t an Olympian, not quite, not yet. According to the labyrinthine regulations of the sport’s international governing body, Retherford’s 65-kilo weight class was considered one of two that the US had not officially “qualified.” To rectify this, Retherford would have to fly to Istanbul in May for the Last Chance Qualifier, a tournament comprising thirty-seven yet-to-qualify wrestlers from all ends of the earth. The top three would go to Paris, and the other thirty-four would go back home with nothing.

Retherford won his first two matches at the Last Chance Qualifier before losing in the quarterfinals, which bumped him to the repechage, the backside of the modified double-elimination bracket. The situation that now presented itself to him was clean, clear-cut, and eminently unsparing. He could still qualify for the Olympics, but only if he won his next four matches in a row. Four back-to-back, do-or-die matches—against the four most dogged, desperate opponents in the sport.

At 3:12 PM Istanbul time, Retherford shook hands with the first of these opponents.

•••

At 8:12 AM New Hampshire time, I’m sitting in my living room, hunched over my laptop, typing in my username and password to bypass the paywall, praying I won’t be let down by the spotty TV broadcast.

As an athlete, I’m basically the inverse of Zain Retherford: for about as many years as he’s been wrestling, I’ve been quitting wrestling. The first time I quit was in eighth grade, three years after I’d begun. I was scrappy, and I’d shown some early promise, but I put so much pressure on myself that every lonely journey out to the center of the mat felt like a long walk to the gallows. 

I gave the sport another shot as a high-school freshman, searching for a new athletic home after missing the cut at JV soccer tryouts. This time around, I lasted just one week on the mat—one miserable week, paired up with an insatiable sadist of a drill partner, a full-grown junior who kept track of how many fist-sized bruises he could squeeze into my skin. But the coach needed me—I filled a 132-pound hole in the lineup—so he lured me back to the team with the promise of a varsity letter and a stern conversation with the sadistic junior (who, as things often go with high-school boys, quickly became one of my best friends). 

My first two years on the high-school team were solid ones: I was developing into the type of wrestler who could wind up as a third-string D3 guy somewhere if I caught a lucky break. But luck broke the other way, and I tore my labrum on the eve of my junior season, which I then spent glumly observing practices from my solitary perch on the stationary bike, my arm in a sling and my attitude in the gutter. I thought about quitting, but to my credit, I stuck it out and got the shoulder surgery I needed in the offseason. When I came back as a senior for my last hurrah, I reached and even slightly exceeded my potential by squeaking my way into the national tournament. (At Nationals, I went 0–2, in case you were wondering.) It was a career I could feel really proud of, my coach said at our end-of-the-year banquet.

And yes, I was proud—and relieved. I was done with the sport: no more weight-cutting, no more wrestle-offs, no more two-a-days, no more interminable series of tournaments. Once you’ve wrestled, everything else in life is easy, quoth the great Dan Gable, and I was ready to find out what that “everything else” would be like.

But that summer, in those dog days just before starting college, I realized: I wasn’t ready for everything else. I was still a wrestler. I cobbled together some highlight footage and sent a brazen, anxious email to the college coach, whose huge D1 program boasted bench-riding backups who had won the same national tournament I’d barely qualified for. By any chance, I asked this coach, was he interested in a walk-on, a practice dummy, a hard-working grinder who didn’t mind the certainty of never seeing a meaningful minute on the mat?

Crazily, this coach was interested. He invited me to preseason training camp as a de facto tryout, and I squirmed and writhed and picked myself back up enough times over the course of the week that he added me to the roster—a charitable gesture to reward my sheer moxie, or perhaps a canny attempt to boost the team’s collective GPA. 

My tenure as a D1 wrestler lasted one season, and it went about as well as you’d expect. I learned a lot; I performed mat-mopping duties with a smile on my face; I stoically sustained my daily beatings at the hands of wrestling wunderkinds the world over; I broke my nose; I tore my other labrum; I picked up three major concussions in alarmingly rapid succession; and I ended the year with a signed note from the team doctor enforcing my immediate medical retirement from the sport. In other words, I spent the season in the long and painful process of quitting. And that, finally, was the end.

The rehab from my concussions—and the mourning for my wrestling self—took me another year, two physical therapists, an actual therapist, and a small battalion of doctors. But overall, I did a good job moving on with my life. I threw myself into my coursework; I studied abroad for a semester. I worked at the campus art museum over the summer; I started playing pickup soccer. I watched the NCAA tournament on TV once a year, and midway through the matches I’d remember that some earlier version of myself had shared a locker room with the guys I was cheering for. It felt far away, a faintly wistful happiness. I graduated. I applied for a job teaching high-school English. In my final-round interview, I mentioned that I used to wrestle.

Which means, now, that I coach. It’s the center of my life again: Who’s in our lineup? Who’s injured? How’s their team look? When’s the meet start? Where’s the bus? Where’s the ref? Where’s your singlet? Where’s your mind at? What’s your weight? What’s the draw? Why’d you do that? Why’d you stop doing that? What’s your counter to this move? What about that one? And what if he counters your counter? I was an assistant at first; now I’ve moved to a new school, where I’m the youngest head coach in the league. Somehow, it’s the sport I just can’t quit.

Or maybe, it’s the sport that won’t quit me, in spite of all my best efforts. Because I’m still always trying to quit: there was the year I decamped to the UK to work on a master’s degree, and the season I spent away from the mat during Covid. And last year, my first as a head coach, I was so overwhelmed by everything—the scheduling, the fatigue, the all-consuming panic that I was nothing but a post-concussive washed-up walk-on with no business coaching my own team—that I kept telling myself I was going to quit as soon as the season was over. In January—coincidentally, the same month Zain Retherford was deciding to go for his Olympic dream—I sent a text to the former coach I’d taken over from, a local legend who’d spent four dynastic decades at the helm of the program before finally making the agonizing decision to hang up his whistle. To be honest, I wrote to my venerable predecessor, I’m not sure if I have the bandwidth to stick with this. 

He texted back immediately: I said the same thing to myself every January for 40+ years. Let’s connect at the end of the season.

We wound up getting together in April, a week after Retherford won the Trials and two weeks before he flew to Istanbul for the Last Chance Qualifier. The old coach and I traded thoughts on Retherford’s prospects—such a deep bracket, such a tough tournament—and then he asked me if I was still thinking of quitting. Of course I was: I’ve been thinking of quitting from the very first time I ever stepped foot on a mat. But I’d be coming back next year, no doubt about it—and the year after that, and the year after that. 

•••

And right now, Retherford’s thinking of quitting too. He’s just shaken hands with his opponent, the first of four he’ll have to beat today if he wants to go to the Olympics. Does he want to go to the Olympics? He’s got a Wall Street job to fall back on, one way or another. He’s got a wife at home, one kid, a second soon to come. He’s got four opponents—four dogged, desperate opponents, from four different countries—who would like nothing more than to snap him in half and stomp all over him and straight on through to Paris.

Of course he wants to go to the Olympics. He glances across the sweaty gym, to the small crowd in the stands, to the shaky matside camera capturing a spotty TV broadcast that’s being beamed to a paywall-protected website. In the center of the mat, Retherford bears down on his opponent.

In my living room, seven time zones away, I watch Retherford win. Then I watch him do it again. And again. Then I watch him in his last match of the day—his last match of his life, if he doesn’t win this one—and I know that in the span of these four matches, I’ve been watching him exemplify exactly what it means to be a wrestler. An elite one, like Retherford; a mediocre one, like me. It doesn’t matter: as different as we are, we’re essentially one and the same. We’re on the verge of quitting. We’re never going to quit. We’re going to the Olympics in Paris.

He's going, I mean. He won that last match, a dominant 7–0 shutout. As the final whistle blew, he stretched out his arms in exhausted exaltation, then pressed his dumbfounded palms to his head. On the other side of the world, I broke into a knowing, awestruck smile. He’d done it: he’d earned himself the right to do it all one more time, on our small sport’s biggest stage.

•••

Three months after Istanbul, Retherford took the mat at the Grand Palais Éphémère, a venue constructed specifically for the Olympics and set to be dismantled as soon as the Games concluded. The metaphor was almost too on-the-nose: ephemeral wrestlers in an ephemeral arena, each consigned to impending obsolescence. And Retherford looked obsolete from the outset, a frazzled shell of his ever-indomitable self, stumbling his way to an 8–0 loss in the tournament’s preliminary round. The commentators—a team of professionals from NBC, with stylish graphics and a crisp video feed four years in the making—struggled to make sense of Retherford’s sluggishness. But I could see it all the way from New Hampshire: once again, in watching Retherford, I knew I was watching myself.

Retherford withdrew from the Olympics the next day. He announced that he had a concussion, which he’d picked up during his final weeks of training camp. He’d tried to wrestle through it, and he’d proven—to himself, to the sport, to the world—that he couldn’t. 

So here we are, Retherford and I, two ex-wrestlers, two quitters, both laid low by time and traumatic brain injuries and God knows what else. But really, we’re never going to quit, are we? On my end, there’s too much to do to get bogged down with quitting—I’m working on filling the holes in our lineup, and I need to confirm all the dates on our schedule, and the middle school’s asking about holding joint practices, and we’re in the process of switching our uniform supplier, and our scales are up for re-certification, and our mats could use some re-conditioning, and a few of our guys might be able to pick up a D3 offer or two if I can help them catch a lucky break, and on top of all that it’s our turn to host the big regional tournament at the end of the season.

And what about Retherford? With the Olympics behind him, Wall Street beckons, that long-foreseen path to the rest of his life. But, as is known to happen, his plans have changed. He’s not in New York right now; he’s back at Penn State, where he’s taken a full-time job as a coach. He can’t quit this sport, or this sport won’t quit him—one way or another, I’ve got a feeling he’ll keep at it forever.

JUSTIN MUCHNICK is a PhD student at the Institute of Classical Studies, as well as the head wrestling coach at Phillips Exeter Academy. His writing has appeared in LitHub, Aethlon, and Sport in History, among others. He is currently at work on his first novel, which ties together the worlds of college wrestling and classical archaeology.