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    • Northern Michigan’s Payton Jacobson Has a Chance at Olympic Gold
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    Northern Michigan’s Payton Jacobson Has a Chance at Olympic Gold

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    Payton Jacobson was 9 years old when he first competed in the U.S. Olympic wrestling competition in 2012. He was a sports-mad third-grader who was eager to see some of his biggest heroes on the mat.

    Jordan Burroughs qualified for his first Olympics at the event and won gold a few months later in London. Rulon Gardner’s career ended when he couldn’t lose enough weight to compete. And when it was over, every wrestler who made Team USA went to the competition in a sold-out Carver-Hawkeye Arena to sign autographs late into the night.

    Jacobson would stay at the arena until 3 a.m., collecting autographs with his father, brother and best friend. And when he got back to his home state of Wisconsin after the game and was bored in class, he would sometimes practice signing his own autograph.

    “I didn’t know if I wanted to be an Olympian or anything,” Jacobson told the Free Press in a phone interview in June. “But I remember going through the Olympic line and we were getting everybody’s autograph, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool, hopefully I’ll be famous someday and get famous enough to sign autographs.'”

    He’s not yet a household name, but Jacobson, a senior at Northern Michigan University, will travel to Paris this month as one of dozens of Olympic competitors in various sports with a Michigan connection.

    Jacobson is the seventh-ranked wrestler (the bottom nine seeded 87-kilogram boxers in the Greco-Roman class) at this year’s Olympic qualifying events. He may be the most unexpected member of the 16-person U.S. wrestling team, but to those who know him best, he’s no fairy tale.

    “Some athletes are gifted, but with those gifts you have to outdo everybody else,” said Bill Kahle, Jacobson’s former coach at Ringers Wrestling Club in Menomonee Falls, Wis. “You still have to outdo everybody else, and he’s the one who outdoes everybody, even if he has special gifts.”

    Jacobson was a gifted youth wrestler in Wisconsin who quit the more popular folkstyle wrestling between his sophomore and junior years of high school to concentrate on Greco, a specialized style that requires competitors not to use their lower bodies or make contact with their opponent below the waist.

    He has been active in Olympic track since high school and went to Northern Michigan to participate in the school’s Olympic development program.

    Since 1985, NMU has been a national training site for several non-scholarship Olympic sports, and since 1999 for Greco-Roman wrestling. Wrestlers at NMU do not compete in dual meets like those at other top college programs, but train and compete year-round in hopes of one day making it to the Olympics.

    Jacobson found immediate success at NMU, winning the 2022 Under-20 World Team Championships as a freshman. But his wrestling career nearly fell apart after he was diagnosed in elementary school with Perthes, a rare hip condition that restricts blood flow to the head of the femur.

    When he was diagnosed, doctors told Jacobson he would likely spend much of his childhood in a wheelchair and that he might never wrestle again.

    Jacobson burst into tears.

    “He was supposed to play football the next day,” recalled Aaron Jacobson, Payton’s father. “When Payton said, ‘Hey, now, can I play my football game tomorrow?’ the doctor, who has no prior patient experience, just looked at him and said, ‘Oh, no. And you’re probably going to spend years in a bed and you’re probably going to be in a wheelchair most of your childhood. And we’re going to do whatever we can to avoid surgery.’ So it was like, WTF?”

    The Jacobsons immediately sought a second opinion and found one of the world’s leading authorities on the disease in nearby Chicago.

    That doctor put Payton on a rigorous stretching and physical therapy program to improve blood flow to his hip. After a few months on crutches, with his father and mother, Sheri, helping him with his rehabilitation, Payton was able to hit the mat again after a break of about six months.

    “When this obstacle came up for him, it was like he had to kick himself out of the box and just fight through it,” Kahle said. “Like, ‘You’re not going to tell me I can’t wrestle anymore? Who are you? I’m Payton Jacobson, I hit kids.’ He was a little guy, too.”

    Jacobson, 5 feet 6 inches (at 16 he was 6 feet 1 inch, but refused to put a height under 5 feet 2 inches on his driver’s license), has always been a standout athlete whose accomplishments belie his size.

    At the age of 4 or 5, he joined a core training class his father taught for adults and outshone the rest of the class with his ability to do the exercises.

    In elementary school, Jacobson set a school record for push-ups on the Presidential Physical Fitness Test with more than 300 when his teacher stopped counting.

    And at Ringers, there were often parents who claimed that their child could compete with Jacobson.

    “Some of the dads would come in and say, ‘I’m going to bring my son over here and probably put him with Payton and some of these guys,'” Kahle said, putting on his best tough-guy voice. “And I said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘He doesn’t have to.’ He said, ‘No, he belongs with Payton.’ And I’d smile and say, ‘Yeah, yeah, we do.’ I’d just say, ‘Payton, he’s going to be with you today, don’t take it easy.’ And he’d hit them. There would be tears. And then I’d just have to switch them. It was funny. It was funny to see the egos of the dads go down with that.”

    Jacobson entered this year’s Olympic qualifiers with a slim chance of making the team after strategically dropping down to a lower weight class since there was no 82-kilogram class in Paris.

    He won all three of his matches in the challenge tournament, defeating 2020 Olympian John Stefanowicz 1–1 (Jacobson won by scoring the last point of the match) in the challenge final. He then defeated Spencer Woods 2–1 in the best-of-three final to qualify for the Olympics.

    The U.S. has historically struggled at the Olympic level in Greco, an event dominated by Eastern European nations. Gardner became the last American to win Olympic gold in the discipline in 2000.

    Jacobson is again seen as an outsider for a medal in Paris; he failed to qualify and lost his only match in a June Tune-up event in Budapest. But he has embraced his underdog role.

    A few weeks after the tests, Jacobson went hunting with Kahle and Woods, who also wrestled in the NMU Greco program and earned Team USA’s Olympic quota in the 87-kilogram class, to Woods’ native Alaska.

    Jacobson and Woods trained together for the week. During a trip that was supposed to be an escape from the stress of competition, Jacobson realized all he had accomplished and all he had struggled for.

    “I wasn’t that shocked about (the qualification), to be honest, but when I got to Alaska, I started to take a step back and I’m really blessed to be in this position at all,” Jacobson said. “There are so many people who work their whole lives in wrestling and never make an Olympic team. I’m pretty blessed. I would have to say I’m very fortunate that the weight qualified so I just had to win the bracket, I didn’t have to do anything else, but at the same time I worked hard for it.”

    Contact Dave Birkett at [email protected]Follow him on X and Instagram via @davebirkett.

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