Name: Kayla Miracle
Country: USA
Sport: Wrestling, 62kg
Previous Olympic experience: Tokyo 2020
Social Media: Instagram / X
Who is Kayla Miracle
With a name seemingly created by a professional wrestling manager, Kayla Miracle became the first publicly out LGBTQ wrestler at the Olympics when she competed at the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo.
“With wrestling, we always try to say, ‘any body can wrestle,’” she told Outsports in 2021. “Shape, size, gender, religion, orientation. They try to be very inclusive. I’m proud to be part of a community that is really trying to push for that.”
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Miracle’s dream of representing Team USA in the Olympics started at a young age. And that dream, at the time, seemed impossible. She wrestled boys almost exclusively at the time, as finding other girls to wrestle was difficult.
“When I first had the dream I was 4, so we didn’t even have women’s wrestling in the Olympics,” she said.
In college, she competed for Campbellsville University in Kentucky. There she won several University Nationals championships.
Kayla Miracle at the Paris Summer Olympics
She’s had an excellent 2024, locking up her Olympics qualification days after winning the Pan American Wrestling Championships. She’s won a medal at those championships each of the last four years.
In Tokyo, she finished in the top 16 but lost to China’s Long Jia, 3-2, in the first round of the elimination tournament. In Paris, she’s looking to bring home a medal for Team USA. She’s won two silver medals at the World Championships in the last three years, so she has a real shot at a spot on the podium.
