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Olympian-Turned-Law Student Wrestles with Fame
November/December 2004
by Carl Bialik '01
Take the usual stress of being a first-year Yale law student. Then add the whirlwind promotional schedule of an Olympic medalist. That’s just the start of Patricia Miranda’s hectic September.
Miranda, 25, won bronze in the 48-kilogram (105-pound) weight class at the summer Games in Athens, the first Olympics to feature women’s wrestling. (Fencer Sada Jacobson '06, the only other Yalie to bring home a medal, also won a bronze.) Two days after the closing ceremony, she was at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs packing her bags for Yale; two days after that was her orientation at the Law School. Over the next two weeks, she was in and out of New Haven while keeping engagements at the New York Stock Exchange, where she rang the opening bell, and at a dinner in Washington, D.C. honoring accomplished Latinos."I’ve been missing a lot of class. I stay up long hours and do reading whenever I can,” she says.
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Miranda’s father wouldn’t let her wrestle in high school unless she got straight As.
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It’s safe to bet on Miranda to catch up and pull off high marks. She began wrestling in middle school, but her Brazilian-born father, Jose, refused to let her wrestle in high school until she agreed to his condition: get straight As. She did. And by her senior year, she was winning about half her matches against stronger boys. “Wrestling was very captivating,” she says. “In the space of one or two minutes, it can take everything from you.” A walk-on in the Stanford men’s team, she cracked the lineup in her fifth year, when she was studying for a master’s in international policy. She won her first (and only) collegiate match. (She also met her match, marrying wrestling teammate Levi Weikel-Magden, who is now a third-year law student at Virginia.)
Accepted to Yale Law School two years ago, she set her sights on Athens but made sure to get a deferment from Yale. The Law School responded with a longhand note: “Go for the gold. We’ll see you in 2004.”
Miranda reached the finals at the world championships last year, losing in the gold-medal match 5-4 to three-time world champion Irini Merleni of Ukraine. In Athens, she faced a tough draw, coming from behind twice to win her group of four. That set the stage for a semifinal rematch against Merleni, who won this time in a 9-0 rout. “I’ve never really seen a happy silver or bronze medalist,” says Miranda. She may seek a berth in the 2008 Olympics, which would require that the Law School grant another deferment for her final year of studies. Her coach at USA Wrestling, Terry Steiner, is “working on me,” she says. “I hope in Beijing the questions won’t be so much like, ‘Wow, women’s wrestling’”—but more about the matches and strategy.
For now, Miranda sounds genuinely excited to settle into her classes. “I get to go to constitutional law,” she says. “I’m just struck again and again by how lucky I am.”
Once things calm down, she’ll consider practicing and competing with the Yale wrestling team, a club-level sport. “It would be a fantastic thing if she would like to come out,” says Scott Klebanoff '07, a co-captain. Miranda says she’s more likely to compete at national women’s tournaments, but at minimum, she will train with the club wrestlers and aid their effort to regain varsity status.
Steve Buddie, her former coach at Stanford, promises they’ll have much to learn from her. “She is as tough as they come physically and mentally, and no one works as hard,” he says. “She does not have great athletic talent, but she makes up for that and more through these basic character traits. She is also more passionate about the sport than anyone I’ve met.”
One Less Talbott for Yale Squash
R. Ryan Hartnett ’07
After six seasons of building the Yale women’s squash program into a contender—and leading the team to perfection last year—coach Mark Talbott is headed west to take over the fledgling Stanford program. Dave Talbott, Mark’s older brother and head coach of the men’s team for 21 years, will now coach both teams.
Mark Talbott took over a mediocre Yale program in 1998. Through strong recruiting and his tutelage, his teams got progressively better, culminating in last season’s historic ride to the national championship.
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“At first, I couldn’t even think about leaving the team.”
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But as the Elis finished a dream season, Mark’s family was dealing with a crisis: his daughter was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes in February. The family liked what they read on the Internet about the diabetes center at Stanford. And Mark has for years wanted to promote squash on the West Coast. Building a varsity program at Stanford (where squash is now a club sport) would be a good start. He decided to resign in July.
“At first I couldn’t even think about it, leaving the team,” Mark says. “It was difficult weighing my personal emotions for this team with what was best for my family.”
Mark leaves behind what Yale hopes is a dynasty in the making—a team that returns all nine starters from last year. “No one is going to miss him more than me,” Dave Talbott says. “But this team has a chance to be the best women’s squash team in the history of the sport.”
Four other Ivy teams—Harvard, Dartmouth, Brown, and Cornell—have a single head coach for both the men’s and women’s teams. Dave, backed up by assistants Gareth Webber and Julia Harris, plans to combine his teams for practice in order to give the women a tougher workout.
Dave says his biggest challenge in coaching the women will be to duplicate Mark’s off-court chemistry with the team. “I know what to do on the court,” he says. “They’ll tell me what to do off the court.”  |
