Ronda Rousey

Ronda Rousey

Ronda Rousey is an American professional wrestler, actress and former professional mixed martial artist and judoka. She is the first American woman to earn an Olympic medal in judo by winning bronze at the 2008 Summer Olympics. In 2018, Rousey began a career in professional wrestling, signing a contract with WWE. She has also enjoyed success as an actress and author, appearing in the films The Expendables 3, Furious 7, and Mile 22. Her nickname, ‘Rowdy’, was inherited from late professional wrestler Roddy Piper.

About Ronda Rousey in brief

Summary Ronda RouseyRonda Rousey is an American professional wrestler, actress and former professional mixed martial artist and judoka. She is the first American woman to earn an Olympic medal in judo by winning bronze at the 2008 Summer Olympics. In 2018, Rousey began a career in professional wrestling, signing a contract with WWE. She has also enjoyed success as an actress and author, appearing in the films The Expendables 3, Furious 7, and Mile 22. Rousey was voted the best female athlete of all-time in a 2015 ESPN fan poll. Fox Sports described her as ‘one of the defining athletes of the 21st century’ Rousey’s nickname, ‘Rowdy’, was inherited from late professional wrestler Roddy Piper. She was born in Riverside, California, and is the youngest of three daughters of AnnMaria De Mars and Ron Rousey. Her biological father, after breaking his back sledding with his daughters and learning that he would be a paraplegic, committed suicide in 1995 when she was eight. Her mother, a decorated judoka, was the firstAmerican to win a World Judo Championship. Her maternal great-grandfather, Alfred E Waddell, was a doctor who emigrated to Canada and became one of the first black physicians in North America. Her Venezuelan grandfather was partly of Afro-Venezuelan descent and her Trinidadian maternalgreat-grandmother, Alfred, emigrated from Canada to North America and became a doctor. She lost her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck at the age of three.

For the first six years of her life, she struggled with speech and could not form an intelligible sentence due to apraxia, a neurological childhood speech sound disorder. She dropped out of high school and later earned her GED. She was raised between Jamestown and Southern California, retiring from her judo career at 21 and starting her MMA career at 22 when she realized that she did not want to spend her life in a conventional field of work. In April 2006, she became the first female U.S. judoka in nearly 10 years to win an A-Level tournament. At 17, she was the youngest judoka to qualify for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. At 19, she won a gold medal at the World Junior Championships in Budapest, Hungary. She went on to claim gold at the Birmingham World Cup tournament as 5-0-0 in her first match in the S-Level bracket. In 2010, she beat Claudia Heill to claim the silver medal in the 63kg bracket in the World Cup in Great Britain. In 2012, she lost her first professional loss in MMA when she lost to Holly Holm. In 2013, she headlined the inaugural WWE all-women’s pay-per-view event when she successfully defended her title against Nikki Bella at WWE Evolution. In 2014, she is the only woman to headline a pay-pview event in both the UFC and WWE. Her reign as Raw Women’s Champion is the second-longest in the title’s history at 231 days.