BAUMGARTNER, BRUCE

born Aug. 31, 1962, Haledon, N.J., U.S. American wrestler who won four Olympic medals and was one of the most successful American superheavyweights of all time. Baumgartner competed in high school wrestling but failed to win his state high school title and as a result was not recruited by top college wrestling teams. Instead, he attended Indiana State University (B.A.,1982), where he won 86 of 87 matches during his last two years and won the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship in 1982. Baumgartner followed his NCAA championship with a gold medal at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. At the 1986 world championships in Hungary, Baumgartner defeated the top Soviet wrestler, David Gobedjishvili, becoming the first American to win the world amateur heavyweight title. In 1988 he lost to Gobedjishvili in the gold medal match at the Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, settling for the silver. This defeat was followed by a series of disappointments in international competition. At the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, however, Baumgartner defeated his nemesis Gobedjishvili to win the gold, becoming the first American wrestler to win three Olympic medals. His fourth medal was a bronze, earned at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, Ga. Baumgartner continued to dominate national and international competition into the mid-1990s and received the James E. Sullivan Award as the top American amateur athlete of 1995. A strong, agile wrestler, Baumgartner was a coach at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.