Her house once burned to the ground, and on her first day of high school, she weighed 320 pounds. But when Stefania Jaramillo looked in the mirror, she saw what nobody else could see: a winner.
“It’s all baby steps,” Jaramillo told me Saturday night, “to becoming the wrestler and person I want to be.”
As Jaramillo jogged into the spotlight to compete for the state championship at 215 pounds in Ball Arena on the luminescent yellow surface of Mat 1, the music in my head was a hit song from 2019. The lyrics made me smile, thinking about the indomitable spirit of a teenage wrestler.
You know you a star, you can touch the sky
I know that itap hard, but you have to try
– Lizzo, “Good as Hell”
Growing up, she played football with the guys. “My favorite player? Bo Jackson,” Jaramillo said.
Her weakness? “Little Debbie cakes,” she admitted. “I had a jar of them under my bed and would stress eat all night.”
Cory Montreuil, searching for young athletes to compete for Far Northeast High School in a girls sport soon to be officially sanctioned in Colorado for the first time, made Jaramillo an offer: Give wrestling five days and decide if you like it.
Like it?
“She fell in love with wrestling, because she loved football,” Montreuil recalled. “She is real physical. She loves banging heads.”
But as a freshman, Jaramillo had to lose 30 pounds, not weighing one Oreo over 285, before she was eligible to compete in matches against boys on the junior varsity team.
Even if you can’t tell the difference between a full nelson and a cobra clutch, and haven’t watched rasslin’ since The Rock departed WWE for Hollywood, the fat kid in all of us can relate to one essential truth about wrestling. Itap a sport in which the first opponent every morning is the scale.
Forget the hard-won points on the mat. For her entire first year as a prep wrestler, victory was defined by strength maybe even Jaramillo didn’t fully realize was in her heart.
Losing 100 pounds ain’t easy? It’s not as hard as watching the family home in Commerce City burn down when you’re 5 years old. “It was my little brother’s birthday,” Jaramillo recalled. “One minute, somebody was yelling: ‘Smoke!’ And in the next minute, the house was gone.”
Twelve months after she ignored her uncertainty and gave a new sport a shot, on the first day of practice during her sophomore year, Jaramillo walked in the wrestling room a fighting-trim 220 pounds, then declared to coaches and teammates: “I’m ready.”
Ready? No joke.
“She was dominant,” Montreuil said.
Itap a dominance that has grown big and bright enough to be seen from coast to coast. Jaramillo began this season as the prep wrestler ranked No. 3 in the United States at 215 pounds. She entered the championship match with a glitzy 30-4 record but was facing a formidable challenge against Calhan High’s Ciara Monger, the defending state champion.
Hyperbole is the everyday language of the games we watch and play. We have become a sports nation as obnoxiously loud as Stephen A. Smith. There’s 24/7 bleating that my GOAT is greater than yours. Idolatry in the sports section is often writ larger than life.
But may I humbly suggest this could be an understatement: When it would’ve been far easier to sit on the sofa, the transformation of Jaramillo from dangerously obese to a strong, confident young woman is a tribute to the human power of reinvention.
And isn’t that the real beauty of wrestling? Itap standing alone on the mat, grappling with the self-doubt that makes us all wonder if we’re good enough to beat a foe itching to take us down.
“Sports,” Montreuil said, saluting the power of wrestling in the Jaramillo household, “has been a life-saver.”
After falling behind 2-0 to Monger, ranked 12th nationally, in the first period, Jaramillo had a chance to roll the shoulders of her opponent in the second period.
“But I couldn’t quite do it,” she confessed.
Monger escaped with a hard-fought and well-deserved 4-0 victory.
Although Jaramillo became the first wrestler from the Montbello school district to reach the state championship since 1990, it was small consolation. She took the loss hard, walking alone down a back hallway in the arena, hands resting atop a head throbbing with the what-if’s of regret, before collapsing in a dark alcove and having herself a good, cathartic cry.
After five minutes of tears, she emerged from the darkness, refusing to feel defeated, vowing to get better.
“It (stinks) to lose,” Jaramillo said. “But it won’t stop me.”
Then she smiled because a winner never stays down for long.
Crank up the hit song by Lizzo. You know the words:
Baby, how you feelin’? Feeling good as …
