June 16, 2008: The Salt Lake Tribune

Beijing Dream Slips from Ruiz's Grasp
by Michael C. Lewis

LAS VEGAS — Justin Ruiz was pulling with everything he had, every ounce of strength and every pound of dedication. With mere seconds left in his final bout at the U.S. Olympic Trials for wrestling on Sunday night, he needed desperately to pull Adam Wheeler off the mat and score a point.

The former three-time state champion from Taylorsville levered himself against Wheeler's sagging body weight . . . six . . . pulling hard to execute a flip . . . five . . . a turn . . . four . . . anything at all that would validate years of hard work and grueling training to reach the Beijing Olympics.

"I heard somebody yell, 'Seven seconds!' " Wheeler recalled later. "And Justin almost lifted me up in the air. I was like, 'No!' "

Ruiz had Wheeler halfway in the air — halfway to China, really — but, at last, could pull no longer.

With his wife and parents and nearly two dozen other relatives and friends watching from the stands at the Thomas & Mack Center, Ruiz's resolve finally broke and Wheeler crashed to the floor, exhausted but secure in knowing that he - and not Ruiz, the five-time defending Greco-Roman national champion - will be going to the Olympics.

"Before the match was even over, I felt Justin start crying on my back," Wheeler said.

Three . . .
Two . . .
One . .

While Wheeler rose and thrust his fists into the air in celebration of another trials upset when the clock hit zero, Ruiz crumpled to the mat on all fours, sobbing uncontrollably. It was the second time he had fallen just one victory short of the Olympics, after losing the championship match of the trials four years ago.

Tears streamed down his face as Ruiz stood for the announcement that Wheeler had won, and they kept coming as he staggered back to the locker room.

"One inch," he said later, his eyes still red. "One inch away. If my lock would have been one inch a little bit tighter, I think I would have been able to get the leverage to score there. I thought I had it, but when I started to go up, it slipped a little."

And just like that, Ruiz lost his grip on the one thing for which he had trained since missing the 2004 Athens Games. He acknowledged this week that he probably would not have kept wrestling had he made it to those Olympics, and said he had envisioned himself many times wrestling in the finals of the Olympic Trials.

"I'm just trying to make the images in my head match up with reality," he'd said.

Now, he can't be sure whether he'll ever get another chance. The former world bronze medalist did not leave his shoes at the center of the mat to signal his retirement, nor did he say with certainty - as did his mother, Carrie — that he will be back again to take a shot at the 2012 London Games.

"I'll probably sit back and take some time to evaluate right now," he said.

Ruiz had lost the first match of the best-of-three championship at 211.5 pounds when he was unable to score on Wheeler in the decisive third period - each match is divided into three two-minute periods, and a wrestler must win two of them to win the match — but won the next with a big reversal in the second period.

That left him with one final match between him and Beijing.

Six minutes, at the most, against a man he'd beaten three times for national championships.

The wrestlers split the first two periods, and fought evenly through the first half of the decisive one. But after Wheeler, who had wrestled through a mini-tournament during the day to earn his title shot, lifted Ruiz to score a point, Ruiz needed to score in the final 30 seconds to win. He pulled and pulled and pulled, the crowd roaring louder and louder as the final seconds ticked away, but simply could not muster enough to earn a chance to follow in the footsteps of Cael Sanderson and Rulon Gardner, two local Olympic gold medalists who watched the drama from the stands.

"It's hard to put into words, other than I'm disappointed," Ruiz said. "I've trained so hard for this. And tonight, looking back, hindsight, there are things I could have done here and there. But I felt like I was giving it everything I could at the moment."

His voice cracked.

"Would have liked to have won."