My Fight / Your Fight by Ronda Rousey Page A

I cycled through a match, the pain of the loss felt fresh. I had lost tournaments before, but I had never felt this level of crushing devastation. To be a competitor on the world’s biggest stage was not enough. I was there for one reason: I was there to win.

NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO BEAT YOU
    I am determined to prove that there is no advantage anyone can have over me that will ever make a difference. At the beginning of a match, you and your opponent both start from zero. Where you take it from there is up to you.
    Other people’s advantages are not an excuse for you to lose; they should motivate you to beat them. Just because a person has all the development resources—all the coaches, all the scouting, all the tools to train at the highest level—just because a person won the last Olympics or beat you the last time you met or is pumped full of steroids, they don’t get an extra score on the board when the fight starts.
    The fight is yours to win.
    My first major tournament after the Olympics was in Budapest, the 2004 Junior World Judo Championships that fall. I went into the tournament unaware of what a big deal it actually was. The junior worlds bring together the world’s best competitors who are under the age of twenty-one. Competing at both the junior and senior levels internationally is rare, which meant I went from facing Olympians to facing future Olympians.
    I took two weeks off after Athens, during which time I wallowed in self-pity. Then one day, my mom came into my room.
    â€œThat’s enough of feeling sorry for yourself. Get up, you’re going to practice,” she said. “Lying around saying ‘Poor me, I lost the Olympics’ isn’t going to change anything. You shouldn’t be sad you lost, you should be angry.”
    She was right. I went to practice that evening and slammed everyone. I was pissed off and embarrassed about how I did in Athens. I was still angry when I went back to Big Jim three weeks later. And I carried that with me when I headed to the 2004 junior worlds two months later.
    Big Jim never addressed the 2004 Olympics with me, but he let Lillie McNulty, a friend I had made at a camp, come out for a week to train with me. That was his way of acknowledging how hard the loss must have been for me.
    Matchups in judo tournaments are determined by a draw, where competitors are placed in two sides of a bracket and then paired up semi-randomly from there. (The overwhelming number of matchups between US and Japanese fighters in the first round of international competition makes me skeptical of just how “random” many draws actually are.) Some routes to the final can seem much easier than others.
    Many competitors hope for the easy draw. People don’t want to face the No. 1 in the first round. They want to get as far as they can without having to put out the effort. They hope someone else beats the person they’re afraid of facing. They don’t want to go through the best to be the best.
    â€œDon’t hope for the easy draw,” my mom used to tell me. “You are the bad draw. You be the person other girls hope they don’t have to face.”
    You don’t look at the matchups and hope to have a good draw, making it easier for you to win. It doesn’t matter who you have to fight and what order you have to fight them because to be the best in the world, you have to beat them all anyway.
    I came out of the worst possible draw at the junior worlds, but it did not matter. I won my first three matches by ippon on the first day of the tournament, sending me to the semifinal. As we sat eating dinner that night, one of my teammates said that USA Judo officials were scrambling to find an American flag and a copy of the national anthem in Budapest. Each nation’s delegation is tasked with bringing its own flag and copy of its anthem for the award ceremony. I laughed.
    â€œNo,” he said. “They really don’t