Washington Post by Les Carpenter 8/3/2021
At 4 a.m., they came to take Helen Maroulis’s blood. She was angry. She was confused. Only two years before she had won a gold medal at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, defeating the world’s most formidable 53-kilogram female wrestler, silently screaming, “Normal people do win!” at the end because who could have imagined that she, Helen Maroulis of Rockville, Md., could have done something like that?
But by the summer of 2018, she was in a psychiatric treatment center somewhere in Utah, inside a room where the door didn’t close, voluntarily admitted yet not free to leave, the words of her doctors still fresh in her head. Post-traumatic stress disorder, they said. From concussions. From wrestling, the thing she loved the most. And here it was, 4 a.m., she recalled, and someone had come to draw her blood, apologizing for the unavoidable intrusion — there were a lot of patients, a lot of blood to be drawn, and 4 a.m. was when they could take hers.
Full Article: Wrestler Helen Maroulis won gold in 2016. Then came a blow to the head and the fight of her life.