Maryland teen Kyle Snyder’s short ride to the top of international wrestling
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Version 0 of 1. COLUMBUS, Ohio — For an exhilarating month now, a Maryland family has tried to process a reality steep enough to be both magical and logical, those opposites coalescing in a hallway within the Colorado Springs headquarters of USA Wrestling. In that hallway hang the photographs of American world and Olympic champions in a sport so ancient it pretty much rivals the lifespan of humanity. To browse along the wall, as Steve Snyder has, is to see some of the strongest, hardiest Americans yet self-made. As Snyder and wife Tricia still try to process what happened in September, Steve reels off some of the names in the photos: “Dan Gable . . . John Smith . . . Brandon Slay . . . the Brands brothers . . . Jordan Burroughs . . . [Cael] Sanderson . . . [Bill] Zadick . . . “And then you think, Kyle Snyder, from Woodbine, Maryland, just did this and is actually going to be up there with those guys,” Snyder said. “Then, when I say it’s hard to get your head around, I mean: How did Kyle Snyder go basically from junior-league wrestling, three years of high school with Good Counsel, one year at Ohio State, and now he’s up on that wall with those guys?” [Kyle Snyder makes history at world championships] Sorting out such a thing can tax any brain, but the truth did come clearly from Las Vegas this past Sept. 11: Kyle Snyder, 19, wrestling in the 97-kg (213-pound) freestyle division, became the youngest American wrestling world champion. He did so in a one-day grind of five world-class opponents: Pavlo Oliynyk of Ukraine, Radoslaw Baran of Poland, Jose Daniel Diaz of Venezuela, Abbas Tahan of Iran and, finally, the defending world champion, Abdusalam Gadisov of Russia. He did so and then, he said, “I started crying. After I won the match, I was just really excited and screaming and stuff, and then when I put the American flag around my back, and I ran around the mat, I went down on my knees and just got, like, chills throughout my whole body, and started tearing up, crying a little bit. “It felt like nothing I ever felt before.” It felt like nothing before, even though, as aforementioned, it also qualified as logical. If you knew Snyder, say the educated witnesses, it did make cold, hard sense. “We use the term a lot: ‘landlord of the mind,’ ” said Tom Ryan, the Ohio State coach who wrestled for the legendary Gable at Iowa. “You get to be the landlord of your mind. I think he really understands that he gets to choose what comes in [to his mind], he gets to choose what he can push out, in every scenario. You know, he doesn’t allow a bad tenant. You know, he just doesn’t. He just doesn’t. He would immediately remove it and put a good tenant in there. He’s just really good at that. He’s great at that. Yeah.” Further, while all NCAA wrestlers and potential Olympic wrestlers have a misery threshold uncommon among fellow humans, and at least some love for the sport, it seems Snyder’s levels dwell among the rarest of the rare. Not all that long ago, he wrestled at the junior level and, he said, whined in the car on the way to practice. He wanted trophies, not practice. Through the mere several years since, he said, he began to amass an essential and astronomical love for the sheer suffering. “Yes. I love it,” he said matter-of-factly, soon adding, “I like being able to look at other people and see that they’re hurting and know that I feel better than them, and I’m doing the same thing. And for some reason, I feel good about that, and I just think that you have to kind of fall in love with the process, and understand that suffering comes with it.” [ IOC’s wrestling decision was a punch to the gut for Snyder ] He went 179-0 in three years at Our Lady of Good Counsel. He spent his high school senior year training and absorbing at Colorado Springs. He committed to Ohio State and Ryan at 9 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2014, deeming it a proper start to a calendar year. He is redshirting this season to concentrate — in the strictest sense of the verb — on the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. As a cog in Ohio State’s first national championship in March in St. Louis, he finished as a pinned runner-up to Iowa State’s Kyven Gadson at the NCAA championships, an outcome of which Steve Snyder, a former football lineman at Towson University, said, “Kyle was torn apart. I told my wife it was like having your heart torn out of your chest.” All along, Kyle has maintained his unfathomable consistency at the art of suffering. His father likes the story of last Christmas holiday, at a swatch of time when all the world seems to accept a fine slough-off, and when college students come home to go find their childhood friends, except that Steve Snyder looked out the window to spot his second child (of four) and second son (of three) doing sprints in the dark. When Kyle reentered the house, Steve said, “I can tell you with 100 percent, guaranteed certainty there’s no one else on this planet right now who’s doing what you’re doing.” “He deeply loves it,” Ryan said. “No, there are a lot of people who really love it. This guy loves it and then he’s got an amazing ability to suffer frequently. So he can come in the morning and push himself and then erase the memory of that and then move forward to the next workout and do it again.” It didn’t defy logic, then, that Snyder would whoosh from No. 15 in the world rankings of September to a world title in the middle of September. For one thing, the rankings margins near the top are wee. For another, Ryan said, “He is a master of his thoughts.” For another, the media reports of Snyder’s statements of his own confidence date from his mid-teens. It just defied belief, still. It ended, the first chills faded, and Snyder had to do the usual drug testing. He had to wait in the locker room. When his parents and younger brother, Kevin, came in to visit, he noticed redness in all six eyes. “You know,” Steve said, “just by the nature of the sport, it is just a very emotional thing. It’s combative. It’s one-on-one. Win or lose, the feelings that come when it’s over are just extreme, and particularly on that stage. . . . To be up and close with those emotions, and everything, when it is still fresh, is really something.” [Kevin Snyder is continuing the family’s wrestling tradition] The van ride to the hotel, eight miles through Las Vegas, carried three guys: Kyle Snyder, USA Wrestling Coach Bill Zadick (the 2006 world champion at 66 kg/145 pounds) and Cody Bickley (a USA Wrestling manager). “We were just talking about how good it feels,” Snyder said, “and just kind of joking around and then, Coach Zadick, he was kind of telling me that I won a world title but at the same time, I have a lot of things that I can get better at. And he was like, ‘I don’t want to get ahead of myself, we’re celebrating the moment, but . . .’ ” They reached the hotel and the room, and Snyder went downstairs to dine with friend and roommate Tervel Dlagnev, a two-time world bronze medalist who trains at Ohio State, and Joey McKenna, Snyder’s friend who wrestles at Stanford. Snyder remembers no unusual fatigue, but he can’t remember a thing they discussed. He returned to the room, got into bed around midnight and . . . “I probably fell asleep around 3 or 4 a.m.,” he said. So: “I just lay in bed. . . . So I rewatched my match on my phone, kind of strolled through Twitter a little bit. . . . My phone was kind of blowing up. . . . And then I was just lying down and thinking about the competition and reaching one of my goals and how good it felt to go out there and compete . . .” He had no worries, but sleep refused to come. He knew Saturday would be busy — going to the arena, watching other American wrestlers — but sleep refused to come. He did not think his life had changed, and sleep refused to come. He knew full well that, as he said, “Just because I’m a world champion doesn’t mean it’s going to be any easier to win the Olympics.” He just couldn’t sleep. “The body was just not letting me do it,” he said. There was, after all, some serious processing. Come Nov. 20, he will turn 20. |