updated 2:56 p.m. ET Aug. 8, 2004

INDIANAPOLIS - When Patricia Miranda enters Yale Law School this fall, she plans to study conflict mediation. Understandably so, since she has already had plenty of it to mediate, much if it in her own household.

Miranda could become the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal in wrestling, yet her career has been filled with far more setbacks, hurt feelings, defeats and, yes, conflicts than most elite athletes ever endure.

There were the fellow students who called her “a joke” for wrestling on the boys team at Saratoga (Calif.) High, and the father who so opposed her athletic career he nearly went to court to fight it.

There were the endless months of training with the Stanford University men’s team that left her with cuts, bruises and black eyes but no perceptible on-mat success. There were the whispers, the stares, the impolite questions from strangers who wondered what she thought she was accomplishing as a woman struggling in what has traditionally been a man’s sport.

Miranda’s answer: She simply wanted to compete in the sport she loved, gender be darned.

“Competing in high school and college, I never thought of myself as a female,” said Miranda, the 105½-pounder on the first U.S. Olympic women’s wrestling team. “In fact, I asked they take down all the mirrors so I couldn’t use it (being a female) as an excuse for why I didn’t wrestle well.”

That was quite often for an undersized female — she’s only 5 feet tall — competing against bigger, stronger males. It got even worse at Stanford, where she spent five seasons as little more than practice fodder at 125 pounds, 10 above her natural weight. She got into matches as a senior only after one wrestler was injured, another couldn’t make weight and a third had grade troubles.

Her record in college-only matches was 1-7, with the only victory by forfeit. She was 3-13 overall, beating a community college male wrestler and another woman in an open tournament.

Women’s wrestling really wasn’t a full-time option; only a half-dozen U.S. colleges sponsor the sport, none of them big-name schools. Also, she had promised father Jose Miranda, a Brazilian-born doctor who had long opposed her career, that she would get all A’s if he allowed her to wrestle. She kept the promise, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s in international policy.

Deep down, what may have kept her going through all those miserable practices in which she was badly overmatched was the hope women’s wrestling would someday be a socially acceptable, Olympics-approved, for-real sport like gymnastics or swimming.

She got her wish two years ago when the sport was accepted into the Olympics. Finally, the two-time world silver medalist, World Cup champion and Pan-Am Games champion no longer has to worry about being one of the guys; it’s OK to be a wrestler who’s a woman.

“I wasn’t raised as an athlete, and didn’t follow a lot of sports when I was growing up, and I don’t know many other Olympic athletes,” said Miranda, who took up her sport in junior high because her best friends were boys who wrestled. “In fact, the Olympics never entered my mind until I was finishing college. ... I had more immediate goals.”

Now she has one goal: to walk off the mat Aug. 23 as the first women’s wrestling gold medalist. She is one of the favorites, having lost a 5-4 decision to three-time world champion Irini Merleni of the Ukraine in last year’s world championship finals in New York. Merleni trailed 3-1, but rallied to win a match that earned her the outstanding wrestler award.

The loss has motivated Miranda ever since.

“Athens is my redemption from New York,” the 25-year-old Miranda said. “Athens is my shot to be better.”

In a turnaround from most of her career, Miranda had a relatively easy road to Greece, defeating Clarissa Chun 6-3 and 10-0 in a best-of-three finals at the U.S. Olympic trials in Indianapolis last month. The other three trials finals were much closer.

“She’s a very physical wrestler, probably one of the strongest in the weight class,” Chun said of Miranda, whose best on-mat assets are her power, intensity and speed. “She’s an icon, she’s got a great story and I’m happy for her.”

No doubt it helped Miranda that she was cheered on by her sister, brother-in-law, two brothers and, yes, the wrestling-opposed father who once scratched her name off entry sheets so she couldn’t compete. At one point, he even explored a lawsuit against the school district for allowing her to wrestle.

Jose Miranda still doesn’t understand how wrestling is scored, but realizes how hard his daughter has worked despite the daunting obstacles he put in her path. He wasn’t opposed to athletics per se, but didn’t want his daughter to neglect her studies because of them.

As a result, his daughter has had little time for anything but wrestling and academics since her mother died when Patricia was 10. Initially, she said, her goal in life wasn’t to be a champion wrestler but rather become the governor of California.

Now, Miranda realizes what a gold medal would do — give women’s wrestling far more exposure than it ever had in the United States and possibly persuade other athletes to try the sport.

That’s why U.S. women’s national coach Terry Steiner has challenged his four-member team not only to medal in Athens, but to be role models for the American Olympic team and the sport.

“I have been given a large responsibility, and I want to carry the weight and represent my country the best I can,” Miranda said.

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