Rulon Gardner

By Joel Stein

Sure, the mob took over Russia, plutonium slipped into suspect hands, and the Balkans exploded, but the worst side effect of the end of the cold war is that beating the Russians has lost its meaning. If this were 1968 and an oversize farm boy from Afton, Wyo., beat Alexander Karelin, a giant 286-lb. Russian Greco-Roman wrestler who hadn't lost a match in 13 years, then Rulon Gardner would have his own Wheaties box.

Gardner, who was not expected to be in medal contention, beat a three-time Olympic champion who had never lost in international competition, who had not given up as much as a single point in 10 years, a man so intimidating that his last two opponents for a medal in Barcelona rolled over and pinned themselves instead of being pulped by the great Russian.

Gardner has the aw-shucks routine down pat. "I didn't think I could beat him. But I grew up on a farm where you just go forward and get the job done," he said. "Even though I wasn't thinking I was going to win, I was going to work as hard as I could." The only other time the two met, in a 1997 world-championship round, Karelin obliterated him. "When he threw me, my feet almost hit the back of my head. That's not a good thing," he recalled.

Gardner, 29, an unorthodox wrestler, pressed up against Karelin, 33, to prevent the Russian from using the Karelin Lift, his signature move. No points were scored in the first round. During the second round, Karelin amazingly unclenched his hold, which earned Gardner a point under Greco-Roman rules. Shocked judges reviewed the videotape of the moment. "He made a mistake, and I got a lucky call," said Gardner, who explained that the seeming impossibility of winning allowed him to grapple more conservatively. "He was the one who had to go out and win the gold medal. I would have been tickled pink to win the silver." With five seconds left in overtime, an exhausted Karelin, who was wrestling his third match of the day to Gardner's second, shocked the crowd, which included I.O.C. president Juan Antonio Samaranch and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, by dropping his hands, surrendering and stepping away.

Gardner's profile makes Rocky look polished. The youngest of nine, who was teased in grade school for his freakish size, he gained his strength by working on his parents' dairy farm every day after school. "By the end of high school, I was carrying four bales of hay, a hundred pounds each, just walking with them," he said. After making the Olympic squad, he raised some $25,000 from Afton locals for the family trip to Sydney.

And then last week he beat a perfect Bond villain: the monstrously huge, opera-loving, poetry-writing, polylingual politician and F.O.P. (friend of Putin). Still, without the politico-global resonance, the Miracle on the Mat will never get the attention of the U.S. hockey squad's 1980 victory over the U.S.S.R. "I hate to bring politics into wrestling. It's two great wrestlers from two good countries," said Gardner right after the match. "Karelin is a world-class individual. I told him, 'You're still the best. There's nobody close to as good as you are.'" It almost makes you long for the Cuban missile crisis.

--By Joel Stein