Legendary Nights: Aleksandr Karelin's First and Final Bout
An Olympic God stepped into RINGS for the first time 25 Years Ago To Battle Shootstyle Legend Akira Maeda
Aleksandr Karelin was a monster of a man. He had been a monster of a man, in fact, since childhood. At birth, legend says, the mighty Karelin weighed between 12 and 15 pounds. By the time puberty struck at 13 he topped the scales at nearly 175 pounds, combining that size with quick and nimble feet, a natural athlete. He hunted fox on skis, read widely and dreamed of nothing more than a life as a truck driver. His father made his living on the roads, driving across Siberia in a big rig, often in weather charitably described as dicey. Temperatures frequently dipped as low as -50 degrees.
Young Aleksandr saw his entire life change after a chance encounter. He’d been among a group of children fooling around outside a local gym in Novosibirsk, Russia, corralled by a coach who was putting together a youth wrestling team. Karelin, although skeptical of the new sport at first, was eventually inspired by the idea of wrestling, the noble and romantic sacrifices required to set a difficult goal and then achieve it. He had been more interested in boxing—his father was a boxer when he wasn’t on the road and he had spent time as a child in the gym with him.
But, after meeting coach Viktor Kuznetsov, wrestling just felt right.
“Kuznetsov convinced me in five sentences,” Karelin said. “He explained to me it’s the process of overcoming obstacles. I was moved by his philosophy.”
When he saw young Karelin on the mat for the first time, Kuznetsov knew greatness, or at least the potential for it, had fallen in his lap. A former champion of Siberia, the coach once dreamed about his own athletic glory. He saw even brighter potential for his young protege, who immediately set about conquering a very competitive scene.
“Naturally I saw that he was a talented boy,” Kuznetsov said. “I was just interested in his desire, hard work. And then, having studied more, I became convinced that he had it in him.”
A broken leg was the only thing that stopped him in those early days, a temporary pause mitigated by the summer days he spent rowing on a local lake, building his upper body while his lower extremity healed. His mother had burned his wrestling singlet, hoping to force him to quit. Bigger and stronger than, well, everyone, Karelin quickly moved up the ranks, eventually winning the World Youth Championship in 1985.
Just three years later he was pursuing a different gold—the top prize at the Olympic Games. In his path was fellow Russian Igor Rostorotsky, the reigning world champion and only man to ever beat him. Despite a concussion and a high fever, Karelin shocked the wrestling world by defeating Rostorotsky for a spot on the National team, then was asked to repeat the feat at a special wrestle-off between the two men designed to give the veteran another shot at achieving his dream of Olympic Gold.1
“They told me ‘You are only nineteen. Wait. Let Igor fight, and when he’s finished, you’ll take his place.’ But I couldn’t come to terms with the title of second,” he said.
The two met in Romania, on neutral ground less than two months before the Games. When the dust settled, Karelin had established himself as the Soviet standard-bearer.
“There were only he and I in the whole wide world,” he remembered. “The score was small—2 to zero. But, according to experts, my victory was convincing. That’s when, for the first time in my life, I threw my hands up and performed something like a dance.”
In 1988, at just 21, Karelin was an Olympic sensation. The Russian news agency TASS sent 16 correspondents to the games in Seoul, blanketing the nation with coverage. The Western media was almost as obsessed, comparing him to Ivan Drago, the fictional villain from Rocky IV. To be fair, he indeed cut an imposing figure, bulging muscles daring a casting director to take him directly from the Siberian wilderness to the silver screen. His rivals called him “the Experiment”, hinting at Drago-style abuse of performance enhancing drugs, in particular human growth hormone.
“Look at his forehead and his hands,” 1984 Olympian and future UFC broadcaster Jeff Blatnick said. “I’m not accusing him of anything, but he’s different.”
Karelin carried the Soviet flag in the opening ceremony, standing out from the crowd as a human cinderblock, leading an on-looker to speculate the Russians could win the war in Afghanistan if they’d simply released him onto the battlefield with a lead pipe. He was just as deadly, it seemed, unarmed, wowing everyone who saw him in action. It’s hard not to be impressed, after all, by a man who weighs nearly 300 pounds with less than five percent body fat.
“I felt like I was wrestling a Volkswagen,” American Duane Koslowski said after being tossed around like a child en route to a 15-0 technical fall. “..He’s the Mike Tyson of Greco-Roman wrestling. At 21, he’s five years from his peak and already no one can touch him. He’s wide as a house. When I shook hands with him, my hand was swallowed up.”
While that point would eventually prove prescient, the championship match of the 1988 Games pushed the young Russian to his limits. Karelin was down 3-2 heading into the final period against Bulgarian Rangel Gerovski. It felt, he says, like the night before an execution. All his hard work, potentially for naught.
In the last minute, he pulled out a miracle—the technique that would eventually be called the Karelin lift. In heavyweight Greco-Roman wrestling, competitors would often lay belly-down on the mat, convinced their girth would protect them from being thrown. Karelin got around that by simply lifting them up, often making 250-pound men look impossibly small, then flipping them over against their will.
It sounds easy on paper. Less so in the Olympic Finals with the clock ticking.
“With time running out I became flustered,” Karelin said. “I still managed to somehow do my signature move. And that was enough for me to win the Olympics. I just breathed out. The fight was emotionally exhausting.”
Besides winning, it was the little things in a wrestling match the mammoth Russian loved most.
“My favorite part of the fight is when you realize that you got your opponent. That you chained him, imposed your manner on him.”
A year later he smashed Gerovski in a rematch at the World Championships, pinning him in less than two minutes. No one could touch him.
“Beyond dispatching these opponents with alarming haste, Karelin was also dulling their will,” Nicholas Dawidoff wrote in Sports Illustrated. “In truth, they felt fear, and what they feared in particular was the move that has come to personify Karelin. His reverse body lift sets him apart from other heavyweights for two reasons: Nobody else can do it, and nobody can stop it.”
By the time the next Olympics rolled around in 1992, his dominance felt almost routine. He ‘d won 90 matches in a row and wrestled for barely seven minutes total in the entire tournament, winning all but one contest by pinfall. In the finals he met Sweden’s Tomas Johansson—in 19 previous encounters, the gigantic Swede hadn’t managed a single point against the reigning champion. The combined score of those bouts?
95-0.
“He was wrestling at his second Olympics like it was just another training session,” his coach, Kuznetsov, recalled. “He was so laid back and confident he could beat everyone.”
While you can’t dismiss his technique, pure physicality also factored into Karelin’s unprecedented success. His feats of strength defied belief. When he bought a new refrigerator, he carried it into his kitchen—up eight floors. During an interview with SI, he casually reached his size 15 sneaker over his head from a standing position, tapping a chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Opponents simply attempted to survive Karelin. He would not, could not be stopped. He became an expert, not just at wrestling, but at sniffing out losers. It got to so he could break them before a bout had even begun.
“The loser is not the one who missed the move, but the one who is ready to lose,” he said. “The inner core that defines character, it doesn’t bend, it breaks.”
Despite his formidable and imposing appearance, reporters and others in the wrestling world, found Karelin to be soft-spoken and smart, a lover of literature when he wasn’t trying to rip another man limb-from-limb. He loved the opera and even dabbled in poetry, something he thought correlated nicely with his chosen vocation.
“Wrestling's like a poem,” Karelin he told SI. “Everybody's reciting the same thing, but each thinks about it differently. How each line or each motion should be interpreted is entirely personal. Perhaps nobody will believe this but a wrestler. Sometimes I have dreams of moves nobody's done before. I awaken and try to master them. Then I go to tournaments and win with that move. Sometimes those dreams are utterly fantastic. Things nobody can do. It was this way with the (Karelin) lift.”
His career corresponded with the complete collapse of the Soviet Union, a hard time for everyone in the country, even wrestling machines. He’d once enjoyed the support of a coordinated, well-funded state system. Ahead of the Barcelona games, he was sharing a room with two other wrestlers, meat and fresh fruit scarce. It was a challenge—both physical and philosophical.
“Life is difficult,” he admitted. “Our whole society has come apart. We have no one telling us what to do and when to do it. It is good. It is bad. We are free. We are struggling.”
In the face of those struggles, Karelin persevered. Victory after victory piled up, including a third Olympic title. At one point he went six years without anyone managing a single point against him. This included the 1996 Olympics, where he outscored opponents 25-0 en route to a third gold medal, going to overtime with American Matt Ghaffari who shed a tear on the medal stand.2
“Matt had a very good chance this time that he did not use,” he said simply. “…I wanted victory. I was determined to win.”
If wanting powered the process, no one wanted it more. He won major tournaments with broken ribs, with a pec tear, immediately following shoulder surgery. He was world or Olympic champion every year between 1988 and 1999.
There will never be another run quite like it.3
In 1998, legendary shootstyle wrestler Akira Maeda was looking for a graceful way out of the sport he loved. His body, after 20 years on the mats, simply couldn’t keep up with the demands placed on it by a business that seemed designed to wreck ligaments and cripple even the most dangerous of men. Never an Adonis, his body had deteriorated to the point his paunch and glacier-like movements could no longer be ignored.
It was a tough position to be in—the fans and his television partners demanded his presence in the main events. But, realistically, especially as his RINGS promotion transitioned into promoting MMA fights, he simply couldn’t meet those high expectations. It was time to bow out, as gracefully as a man who’d rarely known a moment of professional peace, could.
He’d burst on the scene in 1978 and quickly became the heir apparent to New Japan Pro Wrestling founder Antonio Inoki. Unusually tall for a Japanese wrestler, the 6’3” Maeda stood out among his peers, fast feet from his youth as a kareteka lending him an air of danger than it important when it comes to convincing fans that you were someone worth paying attention to.
Maeda, rather than waiting patiently for the opportunity to usurp Inoki in a rigidly hierarchal system, decided instead to carve his own path. He was a renegade, leaving the New Japan womb to forge his own destiny with the upstart UWF, a wrestling promotion with matches designed to look more like actual sporting contests and less like an elaborate pantomime.
“Maeda himself was the most outspoken, mincing no words about traditional pro wrestling offices having worked matches, and insinuating that the UWF was the real thing,” Dave Meltzer wrote in The Wrestling Observer. “Many fans believed it, however, at that time, outside of Tokyo, where the matches would overflow Korakuen Hall to a scary degree, the first UWF never caught on as more than a cult thing. It had many strange chapters, but eventually folded in late 1984, and in January of 1985, Maeda returned to New Japan for a strange three-year run that changed the course of modern pro wrestling.”
Never shy about confrontation, Maeda’s second New Japan tenure included an awkward dismantling of a drunken Andre the Giant and a cowardly cheapshot against rival Riki Choshu. What it didn’t feature was a match with Inoki, a bout that would have immediately sold out any building in the country. Neither, scuttlebutt says, would agree to lose to the other.
Instead, they did battle in the court of public opinion. On October 9, 1986, while Inoki struggled through a disaster of a match with boxer Leon Spinks, Maeda shined against kickboxer Don Nakaya Neilsen in an early mixing of the martial arts. The star turn came in front of the largest audience for professional wrestling since the Inoki-Muhammad Ali match nine years earlier.
Despite, or perhaps because of, his continued issues in New Japan, the wrestling public galvanized by the young star, flocked to shows promoted by the second UWF. Maeda was named Wrestler of the Year in 1988 by the Observer and, a year later, became the first pro wrestler to sell out the Tokyo Dome.
Then, in classic Maeda fashion, it all fell apart due to internal squabbling, mostly over how far the wrestlers were willing to push the envelope. Some wanted to establish working relationships with tradition pro wrestling outfits. Others wanted matches without any scripted outcomes at all. They came together at Maeda’s house. When they emerged, the UWF was no more.
Out of the chaos came several shootstyle promotions in place of one—Maeda’s version was called Fighting Network RINGS and, for the first time, he was able to execute a vision that was his and his alone. His unofficial mission statement could be read by simply looking at the fight cards. There were almost no professional wrestlers competing. In their place were a hodge podge of Dutch kickboxers and Eastern bloc grapplers, many of whom were struggling financially much like Karelin was.
“Because Maeda was such a big mainstream name and draw, RINGS, which opened in May 1991 was drawing huge crowds for monthly shows to see Maeda face largely unknown fighters,” Meltzer wrote. “The shows were built around Maeda as the big draw, and a famous karate fighter named Masaaki Satake, an aging Holland Sambo legend named Chris Dolman and his stable of fierce Amsterdam street fighters and bouncers.”
Soon Volk Han, a sambo wizard from Dagestan, replaced the Dutch kickboxer Dick Vrij as Maeda’s chief rival and brought with him a bevy of wrestlers from his homeland. It was a pairing that worked. The Russians found much needed financial support. Maeda, stung by the back-biting world of pro wrestling, discovered ride-or-die comrades he could count on.
“Looking back now, my activities with RINGS were a healing time in my life,” Maeda told Tokyo Sports. “RINGS cured my mistrust of humanity. Especially the Russians. After the tournament in Yekaterinburg, I was called to a separate room. When I went there, all the guys from Russia were there. Everyone said, ‘I don't know what we would have done without you. Thank you’ and everyone hugged me and thanked me so much. But I was the one who thanked them, saying, ‘If it weren't for you, RINGS would have collapsed.' Only the Russians didn't move to PRIDE until the very end, even though they were offered a large amount of fight money.”
It was this spirit of camaraderie that inspired Karelin to give pro wrestling a try. Although he had been in a New Japan ring 10 years earlier, even tossing Hiroshi Hase around the ring in an exhibition of technique, he didn’t join the crew that eventually came over to do some matches. This time, with the end of his own career also in sight4, he was game to try. For the shockingly low price of $20,000 (“I was surprised,” Maeda admits. “They said ‘okay.’”) the Olympic legend was willing to try his hand at a new combat sport, facing an aging hero in his final bout.
It was a leap of trust in many ways. Maeda was allowing the final memory fans had of him to come against an amateur with no experience working a martial arts style. Karelin, still competing nationally and internationally, had a wrestling competition just weeks away. A lot could go wrong for him, even in a worked match.
The announcement was made in October, 1998 and was front page news in Japan during the week of the much-anticipated rematch between Maeda’s former understudy Nobuhiko Takada and jiu-jitsu ace Rickson Gracie, the opponent he first pursued for his retirement bout. Maeda poked light fun at Gracie’s manufactured 400-0 record, pointing instead to Karelin’s list of vanquished foes, hundreds and hundreds of names with no marks in the loss column since he was a teenager.
Realizing a match like this was nothing to take lightly, Maeda drilled hard in Seattle, training with former UFC champion Maurice Smith and RINGS standout Tsuyoshi Kohsaka, returning to Japan in better physical shape than he’d managed in years.
This was more than just another pro wrestling show and he treated it with appropriate gravitas. It was a legitimate national event, the end of an era and a rare appearance by a truly one-of-one athlete. Fans filled the Yokohama Arena, more than 17,000 strong for a gate approaching $2.5 million, the biggest for a fighting sports event at an indoor arena in the history of both Japan and pro wrestling.
As Maeda made his entrance they converged en masse, wanting to touch him, to feel his presence for the last time.
The rules were standard RINGS: no closed fist punches to the head, no knees or elbows on the ground, rope breaks allowed for submission attempts at the cost of one point and a 10-count permitted after a knockdown. Prefight, it seemed obvious where the advantages would lie. Maeda had more experience in an MMA and MMA-adjacent environment. He had good, thudding kicks and had studied submissions with the great Karl Gotch for years. He was no stranger to violence, happy to mix it up in the ring with Andre the Giant or in a bar, where he once supposedly knocked the Great Muta out in a scrap.
Karelin? He was simply Karelin. That, it seemed likely, would be enough.
In preparation for the match, Maeda had drilled endlessly to score a takedown over the world’s best wrestler. As the match opened, however, that looked like a lost cause. The professional shot a single leg on the amateur. The amateur, built like a Russian redwood, didn’t budge. He barely even seemed to notice.
“I told myself ‘Even if I can't win, I'll tackle him and take him down. I'll take him down.' But even when I tried to take him down, he didn't move at all,” Maeda reminisced. “I thought, ‘Huh?' And then a hand came around and swung me around, and I said, ‘What kind of power is this?' It's an unimaginable power that I've never experienced before.”
The “fight” was an exciting exchange of techniques, Maeda scoring with hard kicks to the leg while Karelin, who never threw a single strike, spent much of the ten minutes tossing his man all over the ring. There was much debate, both in the aftermath and at the time, about whether the match was a real fight or a work. There were skeptics on both sides. In TK Scissors, Kendall Shields was confident it was fixed “given the fact that Maeda still lives” while at the WON/F4W site, Sean Wheelock contended in a real fight the Russian would be “absolutely trucked by Maeda.”
Maeda drew gasps from the crowd as he briefly secured a leg lock and then a choke. Karelin brought them back down to Earth with his power moves and his famous lift. In the end, the Russian secured victory. Maeda, in his last bout, was able to leave the sport with his head high. In the immediate aftermath reports from Japan suggested the bout had been on the level. By the time the tape circulated, however, that consensus had shifted.
“I'm skeptical of the legitimacy of the match,” Meltzer wrote. “The match had great intensity and no matter what it was, it was a huge success both financially and as an event and a spectacle for the market it played to.”
He believed “in the years to come, there will likely be more written about the Akira Maeda vs. Alexandre Karelin match on 2/21 from the Yokohama Arena than any match within pro wrestling this year” but that hasn’t proved true. Shootstyle died shortly after, sacrificed at the altar of MMA, and Maeda’s long list of enemies have done little to preserve his legacy. The bout remains, however, an enormously interesting one, a time capsule offering a glimpse back at a time where fans believed a maxim many of us hold dear in our hearts.
“Pro wrestling is indeed strong.”
Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer.
The Russians had boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Four years later, Karelin would lose a similar bout to Rulon Gardner. True to his word, he immediately retired. Second place didn’t exist in his mind.
“I understand that all this is fleeting,” he said. “Tomorrow I will step off the platform—that’s all. The spotlights and microphones will turn off, and even if I really want to enter the beam of light again, I will not be able to.”
Karelin had almost lost the finals of the 1996 Olympics due to a shoulder surgery just months earlier. His body, like most heavyweight wrestlers, wasn’t built for the long haul.
Awesome, thank you for writing it! Love pieces like this.
Terrific stuff.