PARIS – While still in grade school, Kennedy Blades walked into the Martinez Fox Valley Elite Wrestling Club and immediately started drilling with the boys.
Veteran youth coach Jose Martinez liked what he saw in Blades and her younger sister, Korina. The two had been taking Brazilian jiujitsu lessons since preschool and had begun wrestling in recent years.
They were a coach’s dream: Disciplined students, quick learners and attentive listeners. Korina was the more technically skilled of the pair, despite being 10 months younger. But skinny, scrappy Kennedy didn’t back down from anything.
“Kennedy was just mean out there,” Jose Martinez said. “She wanted to win every time she stepped on the mat. I thought that attitude would take her far.”
More than a dozen years later, that approach has taken Blades all the way to Paris. The Chicago native will make her Olympic debut Saturday with Martinez’s son Israel in her corner as her personal coach, a reflection of the remarkable, yearslong bond between the Blades and Martinez families.
“They have been there for me since nearly the beginning,” said Blades, now 20. “We are family now.”
Blades’ father, Saul Pulido, first took his daughters to Martinez’s club because he wanted a coach who focused on technique. He had few ambitions beyond that, Blades said, because there weren’t many opportunities for female wrestlers at the time. It was already an Olympic event, but it would be a decade before it became a high school or NCAA sport.
Even in Illinois’ youth ranks, if Blades wanted to wrestle, she had to compete against the boys.
And so she did.
It wasn’t an easy path for a tween girl. The Blades sisters heard the snide comments some of the other wrestlers and their parents made about them. They understood there were people who didn’t think girls should be competing with boys.
She and Korina might have wavered, Blades said, if Jose Martinez’s wife, Betty, hadn’t become their advocate. A longtime coach’s wife, Betty Martinez understood wrestling as well as anyone in the gym and she knew the Blades girls belonged.
“She loved me and my sister with all her heart,” Blades said. “If anyone even talked the tiniest bit of crap about us, she would go off. She was our biggest fan and our biggest defender.”
In the seventh grade, Blades beat a series of boys en route to becoming the first girl to win an Illinois Kids Wrestling Federation state title. Jose Martinez and his son, Nathan, were in her corner for the historic victory.
Soon after the win, Blades switched coaches but stayed within the Martinez family. Israel “Izzy” Martinez was a prominent local wrestling coach with a history of training champions. His Addison-based club, Izzy Style, offered older, tougher training partners but the same focus on technique.
“It was the same family so the ideologies were similar,” Blades said. “It was perfect.”
Blades and Izzy Martinez became a formidable pair, with his larger-than-life personality complementing her quieter off-mat style. She laughed at his dad jokes, even when no one else did. She never complained; he never gave her a chance to do so anyway.
“We’re both Latino, so we share the same culture and the same values,” said Blades, who is Afro Latina. “Maybe that’s part of it. We just get each other.”
Izzy Martinez also told her something she had never heard before: She could be an Olympian.
“She would tell me she wanted to be the best, that she wanted to be as good as she could be,” Martinez said. “Anytime she told me that, I told her that she could be an Olympic champion.”
His words confirmed what Blades had secretly suspected for years.
“Ever since I was young, I knew I was different,” she said. “I knew that I could be the best, especially because of how much I was dominating the guys at the time.”
Blades’ father began driving his daughters all over the country on weekends to find quality competition for them. Their mother, Chicago police Sgt. Cindy Ramos, typically had to stay behind and work.
In 2018, Blades won the cadet national championship. As her star rose, she and her sister made a decision to enroll at Wyoming Seminary, a Pennsylvania prep school that had a girls wrestling program.
Izzy Martinez supported the move because it offered Blades a chance to compete against other high-quality female wrestlers. He remained her personal coach, however, frequently checking in with her and speaking regularly with the school’s coaching staff.
In 2019, Blades won the prep school national championships and the junior national championship. In 2021, while still in high school, she finished second at the U.S. Olympic trials, with Martinez in her corner.
“I never stopped being her coach,” Martinez said. “We were always, always in communication. It would have been great if she could have stayed in Chicago the whole time, but that’s not what was best for her. And the only thing that mattered was what was best for Kennedy.”
Under that same philosophy, Martinez encouraged Blades to attend college at Arizona State University, where she could compete for the Sunkist Kids Wrestling Club. Martinez’s longtime friend Mark Perry ran the club and had a track record of producing Olympians, so he felt confident turning Blades’ daily training over to him.
The move paid off in April, when Blades stunned the wrestling world by beating six-time world champion Adeline Gray to qualify for the Paris Games in the 76-kilogram class. Korina Blades, who finished third at the 2021 junior world championships, has been recovering from injury and did not compete.
“I knew 2024 was going to be my year,” Kennedy Blades said. “I was just waiting for it.”
After qualifying for the Games, she returned to the Chicago area to resume training at Izzy Style. Though she practiced with the boys, USA wrestling also flew in female training partners to help her prepare for Paris because women have different centers of gravity and more flexibility than male competitors.
“I’ve only got four matches between me and a gold medal. Four really, really hard matches,” she said. “So I’m going to go out there, do my job and have fun.”
A month before the Olympic trials, Izzy Martinez took Blades to the Illinois Kids Wrestling Federation state championship. The event now had a separate girls division, reflecting wrestling’s stature as Illinois’ fastest growing high school sport.
As he watched awestruck girls swarm around Blades, Martinez said he knew the trip had served its purpose. He had wanted Blades to see how she had helped change the sport, to see the entire generation she inspired.
“It was part of the training plan,” Martinez said. “I wanted her to go back and see what she did. I wanted her to see how different it is now, how amazing it is. I wanted her to realize it’s because of her. You did this, Kennedy. You won the first state title. You showed all the other girls this could be done.”
Blades — who recently announced she will compete for the University of Iowa next year — will have another chance to show girls how it can be done this weekend when she steps onto the Olympic mat. Her former coach Jose Martinez will be in the stands watching Blades and his son take on the world.
He is here for them both, of course. But he’s mostly here for his wife, Betty, who died in 2019 at age 56.
Heartbroken by her death at the time, Kennedy Blades promised to win a gold medal in her memory some day. Jose Martinez is touched by the gesture, but says it’s not necessary.
“Just tell people that Betty loved Kennedy very much,” he said, as his voice choked with tears. “She loved her no matter how she did. We all do.”
