Written by Sean Gregory at Time.com
Three days after becoming the first American to win back-to-back Olympic gold medals in judo, Kayla Harrison takes a resigned breath on the balcony of a condo in Rio de Janeiro and offers her blessing. “Go ahead,” she says, a slight smile crossing her face.
Will you become a mixed martial arts fighter?
Harrison saw the question coming as surely as she sees an opponent’s foot sweep––after all, she has spent her life training to be an elite martial artist, and there may be no more lucrative way make a living as a fighter than MMA. There is good reason to think the 26-year-old from Ohio could make the jump from the Olympics to the cage. Harrison used to train with Ronda Rousey, who won bronze in judo at the 2008 Olympics, and she’s a far more accomplished judoka than her former training partner.
“Who doesn’t want to be rich and famous at some point in their life?” Harrison tells TIME. “It’s a huge opportunity for me and I think I could be really really good at it.”
But Harrison is far from ready to commit. She’s wary of the learning curve, and leery of the outsize role commercial interests play in shaping MMA success. “In judo, you show up, there’s a draw, you have a tournament and every girl fights and the best one wins. And I think in MMA it’s sort of like they pick fights,” she says. “To me that’s not really a sport. That’s entertainment.”
Rabid fans of that entertainment attacked Harrison online after her gold in Rio, when she said of MMA, “I don’t know if I’m cut out for a world where you get fights based on how pretty you are and how much you talk, and not necessarily what you’re worth in the ring.”
The intensity and ugliness of the outpouring still stings. “That’s the other thing about MMA that I don’t like,” Harrison says. “All of these people just started sending me these really mean messages, like, ‘yeah, it’s good that you’re not doing MMA because you’re not pretty.’ And all this. I’m like, ‘well, this why I wouldn’t want to do it because I don’t like – this is not a respectful culture.’ In judo, no one would ever say something like that about anybody. It’s not about how pretty you are, or what you look like. It’s about what you’re capable of on the mat.”
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