My Fight / Your Fight by Ronda Rousey Page B

have it.”
    They expected us all to lose, so no one thought to bring one.
    It had never even crossed my mind that I would leave the tournament with anything but a gold medal. USA Judo hadn’t even considered that a possibility.
    As I prepared to face a girl from Russia, I had one question for the person appointed by USA Judo to coach me. He was not actually my coach. For major international competitions, the sport’s governing body appoints a coaching team to travel with the athletes. For the most part, the coaching staff is purely symbolic. Success is not going to hinge on something a person you hardly know tells you as you’re heading onto the mat. Success is born out of everything that leads up to you stepping on the mat. Before each of my matches, I asked members of the USA coaching staff whether my opponent was right- or left-handed so I could plan my first exchange. Each time, I was told, “I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention to her last match, I was watching you.”
    This time, I didn’t even bother asking, I launched right into warming up with Lillie.
    â€œWait a minute,” my appointed coach said, watching us. “You’re left-handed?”
    My mouth dropped.
    â€œWait a minute, the only reason that you told me that you couldn’t tell me whether these girls were left- or right-handed is because you were busy watching me and you don’t even know that I’m left-handed?”
    I walked away in total disgust. Across the mat, I saw my opponent’s coach giving her instruction. I saw the coach go in toward her as if to demonstrate what I might do. He looked at her and tapped his left hand, indicating that I was a left-handed fighter. She nodded. All of the anger that I had been carrying with me rose to the surface. The Olympics. The missing American flag. The half-ass coaching. I had had enough, and this girl was going to pay.
    I walked out onto the mat and bowed in. My faux coach shouted something to me from the chair, but without even processing what he said I determined it was nonessential information.
    The Russian girl didn’t stand a chance. I ran up the score against her by so much that she must have been embarrassed. We walked off the mat and the US coach tried to give me a hug. I held my arms by my side.
    I slammed the girl from China to win the final. The entire match took four seconds. (That is not a typo—four seconds, which is less time than it takes to read this sentence.)
    I became the first American to win the junior worlds in a generation. I stood on the podium and watched as the American flag was raised to the rafters. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something about it looked off, like it was a bootleg bought at a ninety-nine-cent store and noticeably smaller than the other flags. It might only have had forty-nine stars, but I couldn’t tell. I was too distracted by the crunchy sound of the national anthem, it sounded like someone was playing it into a microphone off a Walkman.
    A few months after the junior worlds, I flew to Spain for an annual training camp in Castelldefels, a coastal town right outside of Barcelona. Of all the training camps I attended, Castelldefels was my favorite. Not only was it in a beautiful setting, but it was one of the only major training camps not attached to a tournament, so no one was coming into it disappointed over having lost or worried about making weight. It was an opportunity to go up against the best in the world as I sought to establish myself as one of them.
    It was also at this training camp, and the camps that would follow, that I saw the enormous disparity between the resources provided to athletes from other countries and what we had as members of the US judo team. At Castelldefels, USA Judo sent one coach, which was more than we usually had. Other teams had a 1:1 coaching ratio. I saw my competitors’ coaches observing them intently, scribbling down notes not just about