Immigrant’s song: Cejudo wins gold

 Henry Cejudo, the 21-year-old prodigy who had wrestled in only one world-level senior tournament before Beijing, won the Olympic gold medal yesterday in men’s freestyle 55-kilogram wrestling.
 
Cejudo, crying the moment the match ended and wrapping himself in an American flag, defeated Tomohiro Matsunaga of Japan 2-2 on tiebreaker and 3-0 in the best-of-three match. Cejudo was 31st in last year’s world championships, his only prior tournament at this level.

The son of illegal immigrants from Mexico, Cejudo (pronounced say-HOO-doh) was 4 when he last saw his dad. His mom raised six kids and often struggled to make ends meet. The family moved more times than anyone remembers.

He got into wrestling because his older brother Angel was good at it, good enough to get invited to live at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo. But halfway through high school, Henry went with him.

The kid became a national champ at 17, then defied conventional wisdom by blowing off college to study wrestling. Yet last year, at the world championship — his first senior-level international event — he didn’t win a single match.
Now he’s the world’s best in the 55-kilogram division, the youngest American ever to win an Olympic wrestling gold.

“Anybody can do it,” Cejudo said. “It’s just a matter of seeing it, believing it and just working at it, and achieving it.”
That’s saying something, because his was the 50th gold won by U.S. wrestlers; swimming and track and field are the only sports to produce more.

The bronze medalists were last year’s world champion, Besik Kudukhov of Russia, and Radoslav Velikov of Bulgaria. Kudukhov was pinned by Matsunaga in the semifinals.