Sport: Wrestling
Born: July 8, 1988
Town: Camden, New Jersey
Jordan Burroughs was born July 8, 1988 in Camden, NJ, to Janice and Leroy Burroughs. Jordan grew up in Sicklervile. His mom worked in a pension processing office and his dad worked construction. Jordan’s most noticeable physical attribute as a boy was his large head, which was occasionally a target of schoolmates’ teasing.
Jordan began wrestling at age 5. He returned from his first meet with a “participant” trophy and was as proud of it as if he’d won. He slept with the plastic award for weeks. His parents were not athletes and were not plugged into South Jersey sports culture. However, in the years that followed, when the Burroughses took Jordan to a tournament that offered big, glitzy trophies, they knew their son was going to mop up the competition.
Jordan got the wrestling bug from a neighbor, Vince Jones. Vince’s parents would pull all the furniture out of their living room so he could hold neighborhood wrestling meets. Besides Jordan and Vince, Jeromy Miles was a frequent participant. Miles would go on to play cornerback in the NFL. Vince would go on to win the state wrestling title at two different weights. Jordan was much younger than the other boys, so they would wrestle him on their knees. It was during these “matches”—which sometimes lasted for hours—that Jordan developed a special distaste for losing. Indeed, over the course of his career, well past the point where a single room could no longer hold all his awards, he still obsessed at times about the matches he didn’t win, and on the “missing” trophies and the imaginary empty spots they might have occupied.
Jordan followed his friend Vince to Winslow Township High. Whatever Vince accomplished—both in scholastic meets and outside of school— Jordan was driven to match. Coach Rick Koss molded Jordan into a superb freestyle wrestler. He won district titles as a sophomore, junior and senior, and regional championships in his final two years for the Eagles. In 2005, as a junior, Jordan reached the finals of the state championships. In a close match, he allowed his opponent to escape a ride with seconds left, and it cost him the title. The next day, Jordan pasted the words Three Seconds to Gold on his bedroom door so he would be reminded of his defeat every day. As a senior in 2006, Jordan won the state championship in the 135-pound class. In four years at Winslow, he went 115–20.
Jordan was ranked in the Top 10 nationally in his weight class. When it came time to pick a college, Jordan—who tended to get homesick—eschewed schools that were close to home in favor of the University of Nebraska. Why? Because Vince Jones had gone there.
Jordan qualified for the NCAA Championships as a freshman at 149 pounds but lost two of three matches in the tournament. Wrestling at the same weight his sophomore year, he was Big 12 champion and won 5 of 6 matches at the NCAA Championships. Jordan came into his own in 2009 as a junior. At 157 pounds, he dominated opponents all year, repeating as Big 12 champ and defeating unbeaten Mike Poeta of Illinois for the NCAA title.
The 2009–10 season turned out to be a crucial one for Jordan. He felt humiliated after finishing 10th at the Junior World Championships in Turkey. A few months later, during a collegiate meet, he tore his posterior cruciate and lateral collateral ligaments and decided to red-shirt his senior season. That gave him a lot of time to think about the road that laid ahead. He promised himself he would never lose again.
Having beefed up to 165 pounds, Jordan ran the table against his collegiate opponents in 2010–11, winning a third Big 12 title and mopping up at the NCAA Championships. Jordan capped his career at Nebraska by earning the Hodge Trophy, wrestling’s version of the Heisman. He then moved into the world freestyle ring.
NCAA titles don’t always translate into success in international competition, however Jordan didn’t miss a beat. He won the US Open less than a month after his final college match and went on to win gold at the World Championships in Istanbul and the Pan American games in Guadalajara. The win at the Worlds automatically qualified him for the upcoming Olympics.
Heading into the 2012 Summer Games, the American wrestling team was not really in the gold-medal conversation. Jordan was rated as its only realistic shot at a win a medal of any kind. Wrestling at 74 kilograms (approximately 163 pounds), he tore through the field in London, defeating Russia’s Denis Tsargush in the semifinals to earn a berth in the final. It was Jordan’s 37th consecutive victory—a streak that at this point covered three years. Two of those wins had already come against his opponent in the final Olympic match, Iran’s Sadegh Goudarzi. Prior to this match, Jordan broke the unwritten rule that all athletes follow: Not only did he predict an Olympic victory, he tweeted “My next tweet will be a picture of me holding that Gold medal!!!” and he was photographed wearing a shirt that said All I See Is Gold.
Jordan defeated Goudarzi 1–0, 1–0 to make good on his prediction. After winning the match, Jordan spotted his mother in the crowd and climbed over a five-foot fence to celebrate with her. Besides his medal, Jordan banked $250,000 from the Living the Dream Medal Fund, which was created to tempt more top athletes into wrestling.
In 2013, Jordan won his second World Championship title at 74 KG in Budapest. He dominated in the final, defeating Ezzatollah Akbari of Iran, 4–0. Jordan was favored to win his third World in 2014, but a knee injury in the opening match prevented him from reaching the finals. He lost in the semis to his Olympic foe Tsragush—his first-ever loss to a foreign opponent—and had to settle for a bronze medal.
In the fall of 2015, Jordan won his third World Championship, in Las Vegas. He defeated Mongolia’s Unurbat Purevjav in the finals, and outscored his opponents 45–5 overall in his 6 tournament victories. His toughest match came in the semis against world #2 Aniur Geduev of Russia. Geduev actually led late in the encounter, forcing Jordan to try a risky move. He scored the winning take-down with 49 seconds to go. In his next competition, the 2016 Yasar Dogu International in Turkey, Jordan won gold again, besting Zelmkhan Khadziev of France in the finals.
In the run-up to the 2016 Olympic Trials in Iowa, the two main competitors in Jordan’s 74 KG weight class moved up to 86 KG, eliminating any chance that he would not make the Team USA wrestling squad. Kyle Dake (the winner of NCAA titles in 4 different weight classes) and David Taylor (a two-time NCAA Wrestler of the Year) were both winless in their careers against Jordan, and were in jeopardy of not making it to Rio if they stayed at 74 KG. No one could remember a class change this late in the game. As a result, Jordan headed toward Rio virtually unopposed. However, in a stunning development, Jordan was narrowly defeated by Geduev, who had obviously learned a thing or two in their previous meetings.
Jordan won the World Cup in 2017 and beat Dake to capture his fourth US Open title. That summer, he defeated Khetag Tsabolov, the Russian national champion, to win the World Championships yet again. Jordan was named 2017 Comeback Wrestler of the Year. He repeated as World Cup champion in 2018, but it took a narrow victory over Italian star Frank Chamizo to do so. The two would become arch rivals from that point on. Jordan would lose to Chamizo at the Yasar Dogu final that summer, but avenged the loss in the bronze-medal match at the World Championships. Jordan had lost earlier in the tournament, sending him to the consolation draw. He defeated Chamizo in their first 2019 meeting, in Bulgaria, too.
Jordan entered and won gold in the Pan American Games in 2019. He made the finals of Yasar Dogu and was scheduled to grapple with Chamizo, but Chamizo pulled out, giving Jordan another gold medal. Unfortunately, Jordan was shut out of medals at the World Championships that fall. The inevitable decline of Jordan Burroughs had to start sometime, and to many it looked as if it might be happening sooner rather than later.
Now in his 30s, Jordan was no longer the prohibitive favorite in the tournaments he entered. That didn’t prevent him from winning gold at the 2020 Pan American Games, but soon after that triumph the Covid-19 pandemic kicked in, effectively ending the season. When the sport restarted, Jordan struggled to gain his old dominance. He failed to make the Olympic team that summer. It marked the first time in nine years that Jordan did not make the US squad for the Olympics or World Championships. He came back in September to win the US World Team Trials, but tore a calf muscle in the final against Alex Dieringer.
Jordan recovered in less than a month to run the table at the 2021 World Championships, beating Iran’s Mohammad Nokhodi in the final for his fifth career World gold medal. Incredibly, Jordan won gold at Yasar Dogu early in 2022 and copped yet another gold medal at the Pan American Games that spring. If anyone doubted Jordan’s resilience, he allayed those doubts at the 2022 World Championships, when he successfully defended his title.
At the end of 2022, Jordan’s record in major competition was 223–15.