Gold medals aren't really made of gold. They're made of sweat, determination, and a hard-to-find alloy called guts.

My advice to young wrestlers is that your surroundings really make a difference. You want to put yourself in good, positive surroundings.

I vowed I wouldn't ever let anyone destroy me again. I was going to work at it every day, so hard that I would be the toughest guy in the world. By the end of practice, I wanted to be physically tired, to know that I'd been through a workout. If I wasn't tired, I must have cheated somehow, so I stayed a little longer.

If you are afraid to fail, you will never succeed.

The obvious goals were there- State Champion, NCAA Champion, Olympic Champion. To get there I had to set an everyday goal which was to push myself to exhaustion or, in other words, to work so hard in practice that someone would have to carry me off the mat.

We, as a wrestling community, better remember it is more than one individual that makes a winner.

Freedom across the world is a result of many individuals working together.