Elena Pirozhkova's improbable journey from Russia to become an American wrestler
RIO DE JANEIRO – The trickiest question for Elena Pirozhkova is never about her wrestling matches or being a woman in a male-dominated sport or even her goals in the Olympics.
It’s something far more basic, an answer most people have at their fingertips.
But when she’s asked whether she considers herself Russian or American, she always takes a deep breath and sighs. It’s not an easy one to answer.
But Pirozhkova, a two-time American Olympian who represents the U.S. at 63 kilograms on the freestyle wrestling team, has some experience answering it. But the first time she was asked, after she was a silver medalist in her weight class at the 2010 world championships, it wasn’t so simple.
“It’s a tricky question, because no matter how you answer it, it’s wrong,” she said. “I’m Russian by birth, but America gave me this amazing opportunity. The great thing about America, in Russia, people hid their nationalities for fear of persecution. I can say I’m Russian-American and I’m proud to be Russian and I’m proud to be American, and in America, I have the freedom and the right to be able to say that.
“America allows you to have your own opinions and beliefs and to express them in your own way. In other countries, you can’t. That’s what my parents fought for to get me here. They took a lot of risks so I could come to America and have a chance to accomplish great things.”
Her parents, Sergey and Tatyana Pirozhkova, had four children, including Elena, in late 1989 as the Soviet Union was falling apart. They wanted to give their family, which would grow to nine after five more children were born later, a better opportunity than they had in Siberia.
The Pirozhkovas are Christian and were facing religious persecution in the Soviet Union. It was, in many ways, what led them to begin an arduous journey to the U.S. that seemed like something that might be found on the pages of a John le Carré spy thriller.
There was also religious persecution of Jews in Russia at the time, and the Jews were being allowed to leave more freely.
“A lot of Jewish people were moving out at that time to go to Israel,” said Elena, who was 3 and the third-oldest of the four children in the family at the time. “They were letting the Jews out, so we pretended we were Jewish, saying we were going to Israel to meet up with our church.”
They went by train from Siberia to Moscow and from Moscow to Austria. But crossing the border didn’t instantly solve all of the young family’s problems.
They were extremely poor and weren’t staying in nice hotels as they made their way across Europe and to the United States. They made it to Austria where they stayed a few weeks, in an apartment Pirozhkova describes as rat-infested. They then moved to Italy where they lived with a large group of other immigrants. Her father, who is now dead, was struggling to earn money.
“We ran out of money, and so my sister and brother were begging for food at the market,” she said.
Eventually, the family made it to the United States, where they settled in Greenfield, Mass. And it was there, through sheer force of will and hard work, that the Pirozhkovas became something of an American success story.
It wasn’t much easier in those early days as an immigrant in the U.S. than it had been in Russia. There was welfare and food stamps and a time when Sergey Pirozhkova was struggling to provide for his family on an income of just $5 an hour.
Her family’s story is common, she said, and is a reason why she can’t understand the anti-immigrant message she believes Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is pushing. Immigrants, she said, are what made America great in the first place.
“That kind of hits a sore point because Trump makes this point that immigrants are bad for America,” she said. “America is made up of immigrants. If you really look at it, anybody who is successful, their parents were immigrants. Basically, we were all immigrants at one point. America was built on families like mine, who came to America with a dream and a willingness to work as hard as possible to get a better life.
“Living in communism, it doesn’t matter how hard you work. Everybody gets paid the same. In America, if you’re a hard-working person, you can make it and rise out of the cycle. My family is proof of that. I grew up on food stamps and welfare and my dad was working for cash for $5 an hour somewhere on a farm. And we went from that to now, where we’re getting close to middle class.”
Wrestling did much for her and helped allow her to purchase a home for her mother. Pirozhkova has been hugely successful in her 10 years on the U.S. national team, winning the 2012 world championship, winning silver in the worlds in 2010 and 2014 and capturing the U.S. Open title seven straight years, from 2009-15.
She made it just like her parents, through sheer hard work. But after failing to medal in the 2012 Olympics, she wondered if she’d perhaps wanted an Olympic medal too much.
Pirozhkova is perhaps best known from those 2012 Games in London not for anything she did on the mat, but for scooping first lady Michelle Obama into her arms. Mrs. Obama went to the U.S. Olympic training facility in East London to greet the athletes on July 27, 2012.
A teammate tweeted out a photo of a beaming Pirozhkova holding the first lady as a groom would while carrying his bride over the threshold.
Despite her accomplishments in wrestling, she’s still mostly known as the Olympian who lifted the first lady.
“Honestly, it was just so spontaneous,” Pirozhkova said. “When she spoke to us, I remember watching her and thinking, ‘She’s just a regular person like we all are.’ People tend to view us differently the more successful we become. Everybody was saying to be really careful around her and I was just like, ‘I want to crack a joke with her.’
“I remember when she came to me and I said, ‘Can I pick you up?’ and right away, I thought, ‘Oh my, I can’t believe I just said that.’ But she said yes, so I just did it.”
But Pirozhkova failed to place in those Olympics, and came to the conclusion that she was too intense. Winning meant too much. The pressure she put on herself negatively impacted her performance.
So this time around, she’s decidedly more relaxed, she says, which explains the tinge of purple in her hair.
“I think the desire to have a medal is still really strong and I still want it,” Pirozhkova said. “I feel like I deserve it, but I know that every athlete here feels they deserve it. I put all this time in and so many people invested in me, but every athlete feels that way. In that regard, we all have the same story. But I’ve just come to a point where I understand the competition matters, but at the same time, it really doesn’t.
“I’ve had the big hype before and then there was London. I’ve had the high. I’ve had the low. But I didn’t change no matter what. The things that are really important are your family, God, that kind of thing. The Olympics are a fun event, and if I win, it’s icing on the cake. I’m going to do my best, but my thing is just make sure I enjoy this experience, understand how fortunate I am to be where I am and doing what I love and that I have a family who loves me. That’s the most important thing.”
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