Ronda Rousey’s hotly anticipated autobiography My Fight / Your Fight comes out Tuesday, May 12 everywhere except Walmart, and some amazing stories from her early years are already starting to come out. Until this point, there’s been a certain amount of mystery surrounding her pre- and post-Olympic years, focusing on her mother’s unorthodox training and her success on the international judo stage.
But an article from the New York Post takes us past that surface facade and into some of the darker aspects of Rousey’s life pre-UFC. Among the revelations revealed:
- Ronda developed an eating disorder while training for the 2004 Olympics, bingeing and purging to make weight because “there was no advice or help if you didn’t make weight — they just yelled at you.”
- After her bronze medal performance in the 2008 Olympics, she took a year off “to party” and got into smoking pot, popping Vicodin, and drinking vodka espressos for breakfast.
- She spent stretches of time living in her car, and the one apartment she could afford had regular sewage back ups which “would come up out of the toilet and shower, and I’d come home from work to an apartment filled with sh*t.”
- More sh*tty than her apartment were her boyfriends, one of which used to call her “a physical six” and cheated on her regularly. Another was a recovering heroin addict who relapsed and stole her car.
All that post-Olympic darkness turned to light as Ronda got into mixed martial arts and started to clean her life back up piece by piece. An athlete without a purpose can be their own worst enemy, but the Rousey we see now is devoted to being the best fighter in the world.
