Karelin lost twice in 889 senior wrestling bouts, each by one point
Asked to name his toughest opponent, Aleksandr Karelin said his refrigerator. He had once bear-hugged one weighing over 500 pounds up eight flights of stairs. Rivals fared worse: across his senior career the Russian Greco-Roman giant won 887 bouts and lost two, and for six years nobody scored a single point against him.
Born on 19 September 1967 weighing 5.5 kilograms, Karelin grew up doing hard labour around the family home, loading coal and chopping firewood, while his father set him up with a kettlebell, a sledgehammer and a truck tyre. He tried boxing, skiing, swimming and more before walking into a wrestling gym at thirteen, already 179 centimetres tall. Viktor Kuznetsov coached him from 1981 through his whole career, and from sixteen onward he wrestled as a super heavyweight.
His signature weapon was the reverse body lift. Lighter wrestlers had long used the move, but hoisting a 130 kilogram heavyweight lying flat on the mat and flinging him over was considered almost impossible until Karelin made it routine, scoring the maximum five points. A reach of over two metres and a grip likened to an anaconda's helped. Training reportedly included runs through the taiga carrying a log, and he went from zero pull-ups as a boy to 42. Rumours of doping earned him the nickname The Experiment; he answered that his real drug was training like a madman.
He took Olympic gold in 1988, 1992 and 1996 under three different flags, the Soviet Union, the Unified Team and Russia, and carried each of those flags at the opening ceremonies. At Seoul he became the youngest super heavyweight Greco-Roman champion, aged 21 years and two days, and in Barcelona he pinned an opponent in 14 seconds. He never lost at a World Championship, collecting nine golds, and his twelve world-level titles are a men's wrestling record.
The shock came at Sydney in 2000, when the American Rulon Gardner beat him 1 to 0 in the final, one of sport's great upsets and a point some still dispute. His only other senior defeat, in 1987 to Igor Rostorotsky, was by the same margin. Karelin retired that year and later entered Russian politics.
Source: Aleksandr Karelin
