> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Greece lightning: Teen going for the gold - URL: https://www.smdp.com/greece-lightning-teen-going-for-the-gold/ - Published: 2004-07-17T15:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T04:44:28.000Z - Author: Guest Author - Tags: local, Santa Monica, #archive-import *Teen athlete fights way to top of judo rankings* *By JOHN F. MULLER Special to the Daily Press* Ronda Rousey has broken her toes seven times doing judo. Sometimes she doesn’t even notice. “They get caught under the mat, sometimes they break in a fight, you know,” said the 17-year-old. “Like my pinkie is broken right now. It’s twisted the wrong way … I just tape it to another finger so it’s like one. Medical tape will fix anything.” The Santa Monican will make her first Olympic appearance this August in Athens, the first of many she hopes, as the youngest member of the U.S. Judo team. Her intense work regimen, aggressive style of play and fearlessness on the mat have left her favored to be the first American woman to win Olympic gold in judo, if not this year, then in 2008\. Her mother, AnnMaria Rousey, became the first American woman to win the Judo World Championships in 1984. Rousey found herself on the Olympic team this year even after a torn ACL left her trapped in the weight room last April and unable to use a leg she generally uses to balance twice her weight. She has just six years of training in a sport in which players tend to start training around the age of three or four and reach their peaks in their mid 20s... and no fear. Rousey didn’t start taking judo until she was 11, partly because she was content with swimming. It also didn’t help that her family moved from the LA area to North Dakota for seven years. Even in the cold, AnnMaria Rousey required each of her four girls to play athletics, at least until they were 12, and had each of them try judo. But North Dakota wasn’t exactly a hotbed of judo training, so Rousey didn’t take a crack at the sport until she returned to Santa Monica. There she moved to a house two blocks from SAMOHI, where she still lives with her mother, two of her sisters and her step-father. Rousey’s father died when she was 8\. Rousey attended SAMOHI until the middle of her sophomore year, when school officials suggested she switch to an online home-schooling program that could better accommodate her travel schedule. Despite the late start, Rousey quickly got very serious about judo. The allure of combat attracted the young girl to a sport she viewed as much more distinctive than swimming. “I’ve always been a really bouncy kid,” she said. “I always needed something to hang on to, something to be doing. Judo gave me a chance to do something where I wasn’t just going back and forth.” Developed in feudal Japan, judo is best known for its spectacular throwing techniques, which competitors use to flip their opponents and slam them to the mat. Competitors can win matches by gaining points from clean throws, pins or choke holds. They can also win by applying pressure to their opponent’s elbow. Judo is one of the most popular sports in the world and has been an Olympic event for men since 1964, and was introduced for women in 1988. The sport requires a certain and unique set of skills — mainly good balance and coordination — which appear to suit Rousey just fine. For example, the teen can throw opponents to the floor with perfect balance on one leg, but admits her hand-eye coordination, a necessity is so many sports, leaves something to be desired. Nevertheless, Rousey gained almost immediate success after she started judo. Entering tournaments just four months after she began training, Rousey won the junior nationals and the junior U.S. Open within a year. Locally, she started entering every tournament in every possible weight class. When she was unable to find willing female opponents, Rousey entered men’s black belt divisions and won those too. Rousey has circled the globe over the past eight months — from Korea to Venezuela to Germany — picking up gold medals at nearly every stop. She won the first-ever gold medal for a U.S. woman in the junior PanAmerican games earlier this year. She attributes her success to her work ethic, rather than any exceptional athletic abilities. “There are a lot of people who could be really good at judo,” Rousey said, “but they don’t work hard enough to make themselves really good. “I want to know when I look across the mat at that person in Athens that there is no way she trained harder than me.” Until this past January, Rousey trained at judo clubs around the Los Angeles area, went for runs around Santa Monica, exercised on the ropes and rings at the beach and worked out at the YMCA. Now, in gearing up for the Olympics, she splits her time between Santa Monica and Massachusetts, where she trains and lives with Jim Pedro, father to a world champion. Each day, Rousey trains in the early morning by running and lifting. Then she does schoolwork until the evening, when she practices judo for three to four hours. Rousey plans to go to college and is considering a career in the biological sciences after she retires from competitive judo. Both Rousey’s coach and her mother feel there was more to her success than just training. Pedro said Rousey is much more aggressive than most American competitors and uses that aggressiveness to her advantage. “What I look for in a kid that I think is really going to make it is an absolute refusal to lose,” AnnMaria Rousey said. “Ronda wins matches she has no business winning against people that are older than her, bigger than her and have trained longer than she has. She has that absolute fight in her... no matter how much bigger and better her opponent is, she’ll keep coming at them and coming at them until they just say, ‘enough already! Stop!’” > “What I look for in a kid that I think is really going to make it is an absolute refusal to lose.” — – ANNMARIA ROUSEY Olympic athlete’s mother AnnMaria Rousey doesn’t think there is a significant connection between her success in judo and her daughter’s. Her support has often forced her to put her job as the vice president of a consulting company on the back burner. “For Ronda, being so good is Ronda,” she said. “I have three other daughters and she’s the only one on the Olympic team. I’ve been able to lay out the opportunities for her... but you can’t miss the fact that Ronda’s done all of those things. “I don’t think Ronda has ever doubted that she can win a gold medal.” Rousey always expected she would compete in the Olympics and remains confident she will be the first woman to stake claim to Olympic gold, but she never thought her run would begin in Athens. She even named her cat “Beijing” after the 2008 host city. After Rousey tore her ACL in half last spring, she was confined to the weight room and unable to use her leg properly for months. Nevertheless, she was back to her regular training schedule by the summer. “I was really frustrated,” she said. “One day, I got so mad I gave myself a big whack across the knee, and that wasn’t too good after I’d had surgery a few months earlier. It wasn’t like a career-ending injury or anything. I was 16... It was just holding me back.” Rousey used the time to work on other parts of her game, especially her skill off her feet. “Actually, I think it really helped my repertoire,” she added. “To do some of my main throws before I had to stand on that leg and balance another person. Now I couldn’t do that, so I had to work on the other things.” Rousey was back in competitions by November, and quickly back on top. “After I came back, I won a couple of tournaments in August and November, and all of a sudden I was ranked number one in the country,” she said. “That’s when I sat down and figured I could get to Athens.” AnnMaria Rousey admits she hasn’t always seen her daughter’s rise to prominence as a positive. “At first, I thought (judo for her) was a really bad idea,” she said. “I found out early on that because America has not won very much in judo, they were so hungry to win they immediately expected Ronda to win. That’s a lot for a kid. I thought she would have been a lot better off in swimming.” Even with all the time she spends training and all the pressure she’s under, Rousey said she hasn’t regretted her commitment to judo or her decision to miss out on a lot of the activities “regular” teens participate in. She’s never been to a school dance and said she doesn’t get to go to many parties. Being a former world champion, AnnMaria Rousey knows full well the difficulties her daughter will face, especially being a female in a male-dominated sport. She recalled male teammates trying to get her on the mat and force her to quit. “In life, you decide what you’re going to do and what type of person you’re going to be,” said Pedro. “I tell her, ‘if you’re going to be the type of person that nobody else is, then you’ve got to be ready to live with the consequences of that decision.’” So far, Rousey has accepted that challenge, even if she must confide that she doesn’t anticipate having any free time or breaks in the near future. “I think it’s all worth it,” she said. “To be a world champion, to be the best at something. That would make my entire life.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/9f/559f9abc-8372-4a2e-8c2d-27386da4e363/content/images/2026/10/071704-03_01.jpg) (Photo: Special to the Daily Press) *Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 17, 2004.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/071704.pdf?ref=smdp.com)