Matt Lindland
Olympic Result: Silver, 2000
Matt Lindland has had a rather interesting career, from wrestler to mixed martial artist to politician to apparel company founder. But it’s the Olympics we’re looking at, and Lindland certainly found success there.
In 2000, already having won gold in 1994 at the Pan American championships, Lindland won gold for American in Greco-Roman wrestling in the 76kg category. As an NCAA wrestler, he’d won the Big Eight title in 1993 and had a 36-0 record in the 93 season for the National Tournament, only to be upset.
Considering he’d embarked on his MMA career back in 1997, Matt Lindland was another early Olympics-to-MMA pioneer who pulled double duty. Compiling a 3-0 record early on, he landed in the UFC in 2000, debuting with a win over Yoji Anjo at UFC 29. Picking up notable wins over Phil Baroni and Pat Miletich, Lindland competed off and on for the UFC until UFC 54 in 2005, and later moved to Affliction, Strikeforce, and finally KSW before calling it a career in 2011. In 2002, however, at UFC 37, Lindland fought for the UFC’s middleweight title, suffering his first career loss against Murilo Bustamante.
