Christine Nordhagen - Wrestling Achievements

Wrestling Achievements

Nordhagen, who began wrestling at age 20, is a graduate of the University of Alberta. She has won six world championship gold medals: 1994, 1996, 2000 and 2001 in Sofia, Bulgaria (70 kg freestyle for 1994 and 1996, 75 kg for 2000 and 68 kg for 2001), 1997 in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and 1998 in Poznań, Poland (both 68 kg). She won a silver medal in 1993 in Stavern, Norway and a bronze medal in 1999 in Boden, Sweden (both 70 kg). At the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens she placed 5th in the 72 kg women's freestyle. She retired from competition a year after the Athens Games.

Nordhagen first started winning titles at Canada’s first national championship in 1992. When she began competing at world championships in 1993, there were fewer than 150 Canadian women registered in wrestling. By the time she retired, there were more than 4,000 women, not counting non-registered girls at the high-school level, registered in wrestling, according to Greg Mathieu, executive director of the Canadian Amateur Wrestling Association.

Nordhagen helped get the women’s side of the sport into the Olympics for the first time at Athens in 2004, where she finished fifth. She had beaten most of the women in the field, but in the last days of her career, though Nordhagen still maintained the reflexes of a cat, she had acquired the battle-scarred knees of a Bobby Orr and did not make the final four for a medal shot.