Olympic Wrestler Is Law Grad, As Is Her Husband and Coach
Wrestler Patricia Miranda, who is seeking an Olympic gold medal after a third-place finish in 2004, is a law graduate. So is her husband, who is also her coach.
Miranda will need to win twice this weekend to qualify for the Olympics, the New York Times reports.
Miranda met her husband Levi Weikel-Magden when they were teammates at Stanford in 1997, according to the Times profile. They found themselves constantly debating, a source of their attraction and perhaps their legal inclinations.
Weikel-Magden went to law school first, at the University of Virginia, after a near-death bout with a ruptured intestine caused by Crohn’s disease. Miranda deferred her enrollment at Yale until after the 2004 Athens Games. When she retired from wrestling to attend Yale, she found herself missing the moments she shared with her husband as he coached her, the story says. At her husband’s urging, she came out of retirement.
Weikel-Magden helped Miranda overcome two problems, the story says. She tended to think too much in a sport where instinct is a plus. And she needed to tap into anger and use it in her wrestling, while remaining poised at the same time.
“Wrestling is anything but intellectual,” Weikel-Magden told the Times. “We can be our own worst enemies that way.”
