Dan Gable Won the Olympics 57–0. He Still Talks About the Match He Lost

Lex Fridman opens by admitting a failure. He first published this conversation with Dan Gable as a standalone, not as part of the podcast, and it did not find many listeners. Gable, he says, is bigger than records: undefeated in high school, undefeated in college until the last match, then a world champion and an Olympic champion who did not surrender a single point at the 1972 Games. As Iowa's coach he led the Hawkeyes to 15 national titles and 25 consecutive Big Ten championships, and he produced 150 All-Americans, 45 national champions, 106 Big Ten champions, and 12 Olympians, including eight medalists.

When the two men finally sit down, Gable's first comparison is national. Russian wrestling, he says, is science: they study the sport, they are technically excellent, and they are sharp on strategy. What they do not push is the raw toughness or the conditioning. Americans need what the Russians have; the Russians need what the Americans have. Gable's own explanation for beating them is that he went their way a little and kept his hardness. He was known for toughness. He was not known for art.

The art arrived after a loss. Gable had won 181 matches in a row over seven years, not just winning but, in his word, punishing people. That streak made him think he was already an artist. He was not. He did not know how to get the next layer out of himself until Larry Owings beat him in his senior NCAA final. Then he realized he had to buckle down, learn the science, and become more of an artist. The American who later showed the country that artistic wrestling was Dave Schultz, who went to the Soviet Union as a high-schooler, stole their science, and still had American training in him — though Gable says Schultz was more Russian than American on the mat.

Asked for the common thread among 45 national champions, Gable says they all had at least one of the two avenues already on the table — science or toughness — and his rooms tried to intertwine them. Early on, though, his recruiting was one-dimensional. He recruited attitude. Then he decided that was not enough. He needed genetics in the wrestling room, because the hard workers could watch a gifted kid's execution, call it unbelievable, and still beat that kid after the first minute.

He does not claim technique is purely inborn. What he puts on the genetic side is the ability to move, timing, quickness, and strength. Walk into a Russian room, he says, and you see people hitting skills, not banging into each other. After practice they may not sprint; they walk to ropes hanging from the ceiling, climb, come down, and wait while three or four other guys go. Gable made his athletes climb, get down, and climb again. He also came to see that he needed a mix. Some of his best kids, he adds, really should not have been wrestlers. They were not very coordinated. They worked so hard they developed themselves anyway.

Gable's description of the coach's role is almost boring until he unpacks it. You have to prove you know what you are doing — technique, everything. You have to be the first person there and the last to leave. You have to be the most dedicated person in the building, even though the athletes are the ones trying to win the titles. The proof is visible: you are ahead of them in the morning, still there after they leave, picking up, analyzing, working. Over time the method has to win, because some of those athletes will only believe the work if the coach is obviously doing it too.

Pushing people to a limit is the other half, and he is careful with it. A limit is not the last limit; there are limits above it. Coaches lose kids — to heat, to hard work, to something that turns them off or runs them off or comes closer than anyone wanted. You have to know when to back off. You have to read the athlete, and he means each person, not the team. You get that knowledge by being there at four in the morning and two or three hours after practice, in the hot room, the sauna, the steam, the whirlpool. You get in with them and you listen. You are not only feeding information out.

After practice, in a room where people are relaxed, he says the atmosphere is like a massage. Words start flowing. The coach takes them in, and something will be said that he can act on. He is blunt about the stakes. He has saved a couple of kids who were on the brink. In a high-performance atmosphere, life and death are involved — not because you pushed someone until he died on the mat, but because a person who has made winning the whole meaning of life may go home, feel himself a failure, and take his own life. The reading has to be of the individual, or you miss the moment.

Fridman brings up Chad Zaputil, the Iowa wrestler Gable wrote about in *A Wrestling Life*: three NCAA finals, three losses, and a tattoo of a horse clawing a human heart out of a chest. Gable will not treat the suffering as something to erase. Keep it, he says, because it has to be turned. Zaputil lost, so he will never feel perfect. The work is to get him to see that he is still unique compared with almost everyone who walks the earth — right at the top, just a little short — and then to put the pain to some good use, because a person like that has a lot of goodwill to give.

It took years. Years of tattooing, years of covering the tattoo. After eligibility ended Zaputil stayed around Iowa with a good job; Gable thought he was doing well. Then he said he had to escape. Where are you going, Gable asked. California, Zaputil said, because that is where everybody goes to hide. Gable told him he was wrong about that, and that what would determine his life would be what he did when no one was watching. Zaputil found a place he thought he could fit, got a job helping people, and covered the tattoo with feathers and other ink. Gable still says he is not done.

Gable keeps returning to Roger Bannister, the man who broke the four-minute mile when people said a human would die trying. The lesson he takes is almost too plain: the impossible is possible; time changes things. The mile is now some twenty seconds faster, and hundreds of people have gone under four. It is common knowledge, he says, that you have to be able to run a four-minute mile if you want to win at a major level. Record performances change because knowledge changes, shoes change, nutrition changes — factors the old barrier never priced in.

He has a smaller, meaner version of the same story from his own high school. For years the rule was that you did not drink water at practice. Water was weakness; going without it was how you toughened up. They would sweat until there was almost no sweat left, and by the end of practice they were not even wrestling. They were sitting against a wall. Then the rule changed. Drink water. Bring Gatorade. Suddenly they were still competing at the end of the session. Looking back, Gable figures that for two and a half high-school years, plus junior high, he could not push as hard as he should have because he was under-watered.

Fridman asks when he first believed, in a way people might have laughed at, that he would be Olympic champion. Gable says he always visualized being the best, from the YMCA at age five. He did not have to announce the dream. People saw a kid in the yard swinging a baseball bat right-handed and left-handed until the grass was dirt, or running through the furniture as his own quarterback. He was not the fastest or the strongest then. Before the Olympics, testing put him high across the board rather than first in any one quality. Other people spiked higher on a single measure and then dropped. He did not have many holes. He also did not have a score that, by itself, said he would win the Games.

Fridman walks him back to the 68-kilogram freestyle gold. Gable scored 57 points and had zero scored on him. Weigh-ins were every day, two hours before competition, which that day meant two hours before a race that might not start until evening. He was only about a pound over. He went to the sauna. On the morning of the finals another athlete was already in there — a European woman, he thinks, without her top, which was common enough that he still wonders whether it was a plot. Country-versus-country games, he says, produce crazy stuff. He almost stayed too long and lost a little more weight than he needed. It did not really bother him. He was not cutting much.

Was he nervous? He was confident. He knew he was going to win, not from cockiness, but because for three and a half years he had gone to practice and won every practice. He hardly ever lost a takedown. If somebody scored on him, he could not sleep until he figured it out; if he did not figure it out, he fell asleep and woke up with the answer. He would not always test the fix the next day. He did not want the other guy to know he had thought about it all night. Maybe three days later, when they wrestled again, the move was gone. Even a failed offensive shot got the same filtering.

The Soviets, he says, picked a finalist with a great attitude, a typical artist who hooked elbows in the style of that region. They also cut him down a weight, and Gable thinks that cost him some of his go — a scientific process Americans and Russians can both get wrong, and one the Russians did not usually live in, because they more often wrestled near their natural weight. The man still reached the finals, having also lost in the round robin to a Japanese wrestler. To take gold from Gable he had to pin him or beat him by eight. Gable had spent the two years after Owings adding enough art to finish matches. He cannot remember taking many risks that put him on his back. The risks were technically correct enough that he would not land in the danger zone. Collegiate escapes like a Granby roll, which expose the shoulders for two points, had already taught him that the freestyle system is different.

How did the gold feel? The better question, Gable says, is how he would have felt if he had lost it. He had already been through that at the NCAA level, and it did not sit well. He was not afraid of it happening again in Munich; that fear is why he had changed the philosophy and added the scientific work. Even a squeaked-out Olympic win would have bothered him. ABC's *Wide World of Sports* had wanted him, before the Owings match, to introduce the next week's show by promising he would finish undefeated at 182–0. He could barely talk. It took 22 takes. Then it was time to wrestle. He calls the whole sequence a coaching education: you learn through the mistakes in your own career. It is an ever-learning process.

Has he ever been afraid on the mat? He is sure fear is out there, and he is sure it was almost always to his advantage. In the Olympic final, if the other man had doubts, those doubts were Gable's edge. He does not know that he ever really had fear. Looking back at the few times he did not perform as well, he does not blame American rah-rah. He thinks it was the fear of not being an artist — of the other guy being better scientifically. That, he says, got to him more than anything else.

Tiredness he tried to delete. Early on he decided he wanted to eliminate ever having to worry about getting tired in a match, and he treats that as a fear a lot of wrestlers still carry: how will I feel, will I gas, will it wreck the performance. As a coach he tried to take that fear off his own athletes and leave it on the opponent. The remaining job was focus, doing the right things, and not repeating mistakes. Make a mistake once and repeat it, he says, and you did not learn anything.

His own unfinished athletic goal was to work so hard he passed out on the mat and had to be carried off. He never did. He can recount four or five practices where the whistle blew and the walk from the far end of a hot, crowded room to the door became a question of whether the next step was possible. He needed air, water, oxygen. He was dizzy. He made the door, got cold water on his face, and stayed conscious. His daughter Molly did collapse, in a race she was winning against people she did not usually beat, five feet from the finish. She did not win, and she had to qualify for the next event. He thinks she learned she could be better, and also that she had to hold up.

The Brands brothers, he told Fridman in the book, looked up to Royce Alger, who pushed the physical limit without getting too rough. Anger, Gable says, causes less successful wrestling. It makes you mistake and get out of position because anger is a loss of control. There can be a furious attack, but once it crosses into anger you are vulnerable. Royce and the Brands wrestled to the edge; when the whistle blew they stopped. Other people keep going, the way a football fight continues after the play. A new edition of a Mike Chapman book describes Northern Iowa's Bill Cole sitting apart before a match and getting into controlled anger that raised his strength, speed, and thinking. One side of the line is fuel. The other is not performance, because you start giving up points.

Talking about Royce Alger's world-silver haunting — twenty seconds from winning, still not fine no matter how often he says he is — Gable says you do not get over those things. Then he asks whether Fridman thinks he is ever going to get over the murder of his sister. On May 31, 1964, Diane was raped and murdered by a local boy. Gable was fifteen, a high-school sophomore. Under the right mood, a Mountain Dew, a beer, or country music turned up, the emotions still come. He does not need an extreme trigger. How it changed him, he says, was the realization that he was already pretty well developed, and that his much older parents, now down to one child, were suffering more than he was and were not handling it.

The part he still judges himself for is communication. Three weeks earlier, walking to school with a troubled neighbor he had never walked with before, the boy said something about Diane that was not normal. Gable told nobody. After she was killed it took him twenty-five or thirty minutes to connect the two facts. He told his father he might know who did it. His father pushed him against the car. His mother slapped him. He explained it had sounded like boy talk. His father hugged him for a long time. He absolutely blames himself, and he also says he was fifteen, and you make mistakes, and you do not act on everything that happens.

What he did with the rest of his life was act on things that were not even of that consequence. He has four daughters. Every time they left in a car he said something — don't ride with a drinker, stay out of trouble, you know how to get out if the car goes into the river — and they would tell him he had said it last night. He did not care. He was still thinking ahead because of a walk to school on which he had kept his mouth shut. He also took the word *choice* out of his life. Do the right thing. Do the thing you should do. If someone offers this or that, he wants to know which is better, and then there is no choice: just give him the right way to go. He was not perfect. He says it made a big difference, including forty-four years of marriage.

The family almost split. His parents blamed each other. After he left for college they discovered they liked being alone together, and following him through college, the Worlds, the Olympics, and the coaching gave them purpose. It gave his wife and daughters a purpose too, being close to those championships. There is now a family of twenty-two, all interested in the same things. Could a wrestler do it alone? You could, he says. Why would you want to. The chances are much smaller. He never got away from the profession, even at home.

In the backyard, thirty feet from the house, Gable has a cabin: office, workout room, sauna, a bed upstairs if he ever gets too close. It is his house away from his house. He has spent a lifetime gone from eight in the morning until seven-thirty, eight, even eleven — twelve-hour days. In retirement he is home more, and his wife is trying to slow him down. Distance, he says, is sometimes how you know your role.

The night before the interview, a man in Delaware had asked him to speak, hoping to build wrestling in a state with no college programs. Gable said yes in his head because that is his life, and he did not tell his wife until the next morning that he might go on Friday, December 21. She told him the family was celebrating Christmas that weekend, early, because that was the only time many relatives could come. She started to get emotional. If he wants another year of marriage, he says — forty-five — he had better tell those people he has family obligations. He loves wrestling. There is more than one person who can give that speech.

In 2013 the International Olympic Committee voted wrestling out of the Games. Five years later, was he surprised? Yes. Did it really surprise him? No. You have to have top people running the organization. If you take anything for granted, someone with authority can kick you out. Wrestling is one of the original Olympic sports, in 180-some countries, including politically strong ones. They thought they were fine. Then you look at who runs the IOC. Wrestling, Gable says, had never had anybody on it. Why? Because they did not have to. That, he says, is wrong. If you do not have someone looking out for you inside the structure, people turn their heads.

All it took was the statement that they were done. For the first time he can remember, competitive people who had been working their own agendas turned those agendas to the sport. They got voted back in before they were even fully out. That does not mean they are safe. Leadership changed and is better; it has to stay better, and there are still things they should be doing so the same mess does not return. He first heard at four or four-thirty in the morning. His wife had been up on the internet. He thought she was joking, jumped out of bed, started making calls, and when it was true the feeling was devastating — a nightmare. He broke down and wept. He does not cry about every loss. This one overcame him. You do not let it happen again. You keep getting stronger.

Fridman wants him to zoom out to cave drawings and the ancient Greek Games, two human beings locked in a fair struggle. Gable says he never looked at it as anything but combat, and at points in a life that combat made him more determined to get more out of himself. He does not think people feel that way unless they have already had a lot of accomplishments. Success, like Bannister's near-misses, is what creates the chance to look more finely at how to make the thing better. Upstairs he has Russian technique books he cannot read. He can read the diagrams. You study the best. You do not focus on them so hard that you cannot beat them. You learn what they have, then you bring the thing they do not — toughness to go with the art.

He is a river-and-lake fisherman, not an ocean one. The biggest fish he talks about is a northern pike of twenty-some pounds. He likes walleye because they eat well, and the best eating fish are not the biggest. People hunt deer on his land looking for the big bucks, which are the best trophies and not the best meat. He has a couple of trophy walleyes on the wall. Most of the big ones go back. Fridman offers Hemingway's *The Old Man and the Sea*, the eighteen-foot fish, the sharks, and the line that it is better to be lucky but the old man would rather be exact, so that when luck comes he is ready.

Gable is not about luck, though he thinks some is involved, and he thinks most of it is created by preparation. People can say he was lucky to win all those awards. If you analyze his life, he does not think luck was the ingredient. It was preparation, and science. He is only as smart as today. When he was training, or training other people, he was as lucky as whatever was available to him in that moment — and that, he says, is what you call science. Looking back he would do a lot of things differently because they have been proven differently: water during practice, letting athletes change out of wrestling shoes before they sprint on concrete, not making a kid climb twelve ropes and then do it again the next day. Add to the philosophy. It may have been great at that time. What matters is where you are today. Take attitude out and depend on total science, and you will not be as good.

Two famous people told him the same thing. The novelist John Irving said writing school taught him a lot, but the ability to stay focused, work extra hours, and be more disciplined came from wrestling practice. Norman Borlaug, the Iowa plant scientist credited with feeding underprivileged countries and, in Gable's telling, saving a billion lives, with a statue in Washington, said he gave the sport a lot of credit. That does not mean a wrestler automatically makes it in the next field. You still have to take the values and apply them. Some people forget. Some people cannot get over the high of having their arm raised. What is even greater, Gable says, is if you are the coach and it is the other person's arm. And if the arm does not go up, what you walk away with — how you learn to handle that — matters too, because there will be losses. You just do not want many. You do not want to get used to losing.