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As she fumed in private over her loss to Di Stasio, an unexpected sense of liberation washed over Wiebe. “I can lose,” she said to herself. “I am not national champion. And I am still alive.” Instead of crushing her, the loss allowed Wiebe to shed the expectations she’d burdened herself with. “Losing Nationals really helped me to realign my vision of what I wanted to do.” This realignment did not occur overnight. A few months after Nationals, Wiebe lost to Di Stasio again at a tournament in Greece. “I was really, truly humble at that point,” she recalls.

Afterwards, Wiebe focused on why she loved to wrestle in the first place. “My favourite thing is when you get past the point of exhaustion. And you are just in this moment of instinct. When you free yourself from the concept of winning and losing. When you feel the purity of being in your body.” High-level athletes in all sports speak about reaching these moments of physical and mental grace when everything seems to flow without conscious effort. “But in wrestling, you are experiencing that with another person,” Wiebe says. “You are inhaling their oxygen. Their sweat and blood. Wrestling is a rare sport when your opponent is both your adversary and someone you are sharing an embodied experience with. It is so intimate.”

…There is nothing about wrestling that is fun. It’s not like tickling my boyfriend or playing with a puppy.

I know the corporal intimacy Wiebe speaks about. All wrestlers do. We know the gasp of an opponent once he quits fighting your gut wrench and surrenders to the turn. Or the moment near the end of a match when you read your rival’s fatigue by the pace of his breath and the limpness of his arms. Or the subtle but unmistakable shift of balance that allows you to twist an opponent off his feet, and the crumb of a second when your merged bodies are airborne before the crash. Or the opposite: when you’ve stepped forward at the wrong time and you know, with the certainty of physics, that your legs are about to sail over your head and all you can do is watch them pass.