Named after a wrestler before he could walk, unbeaten in high school for three years, Olympic champion at twenty-one, and then away from the sport twice and back from it twice. The short version is a gold medal; the longer one is stranger than that.
Born in Portage, Indiana, on 31 May 2000, and given a wrestler's name by a mother who had decided what he would be doing.
His mother named him Gable Dan, after Dan Gable — the Iowa State and Olympic champion who lost one match in his entire collegiate career and then coached Iowa to fifteen national titles. It is the most loaded name in American wrestling and it was handed to a child who, by the family's account, started wrestling as soon as he could walk, following two older brothers into it.
One of those brothers, Bobby, would later wrestle professionally for WWE as Damon Kemp until his contract expired in July 2024. For most of the first decade there is nothing on the record but youth national tournaments, several of which he won.
The family moved to Apple Valley, Minnesota so he and Bobby could wrestle for the high school there. He lost three matches in five years.
He was in seventh grade when they moved. At thirteen he reached the Minnesota state final with a 39–2 record and lost it — the last match he would lose in middle school, and one of very few he would lose at all.
What followed was four state titles and a 171-match winning streak. His last two state championship matches lasted twenty-eight seconds between them. He finished high school at 210–3, a winning percentage of 98.59% and the highest in the history of Minnesota high school wrestling.
In freestyle he was already beating the rest of the world in his age group: gold at the 2015 Cadet World Championships, gold again in 2016, and the 2017 Junior World title. He was the top recruit in the country and he stayed home, choosing the University of Minnesota.
A redshirt pulled in November, an undefeated dual season, and then Anthony Cassar, twice.
He began his freshman year on a redshirt, winning the Daktronics and Bison Opens, and the redshirt came off in November. He went 14–0 in duals, won the Cliff Keen Invitational, and beat the second-ranked heavyweight in the country, Derek White, in his collegiate debut.
He arrived at the Big Ten Championships as the top seed and lost the final to Penn State's Anthony Cassar by a point — his first defeat in folkstyle since eighth grade. At the NCAA Championships in Pittsburgh the two met again in the semifinals and Cassar won by the same 4–3 score. He wrestled back for third place and finished the season an All-American.
In freestyle that May he went through the World Team Trials Challenge Tournament — beating a Greco-Roman world finalist, a two-time NCAA champion and two more All-Americans — before losing twice to Nick Gwiazdowski on criteria and missing the world team.
On 15 June 2019 he and a Minnesota teammate were arrested on suspicion of sexual assault and suspended from all team activities. In December the county attorney announced that no criminal charges would be brought, citing a lack of adequate evidence. He returned to the team for the following season.
Twelve dual wins, a Big Ten title, the top seed at the national championships — and then the tournament was cancelled.
He came back and went 12–0 in duals, becoming the top-ranked heavyweight in the United States. Seeded second at the Big Ten Championships despite the ranking, he pinned the tenth seed, beat the third, and took the title from top-seeded Mason Parris of Michigan.
He was to enter the NCAA Championships as the number one seed. The tournament was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and he was named a first-team All-American on the season's record instead. The Olympic Trials, scheduled for April, were postponed with the Games themselves.
In October 2020 the NCAA granted winter athletes an extra year of eligibility. That decision is the reason the rest of this page exists in the shape it does.
A national title in March, the Olympic Trials in April, and in August the last two takedowns of a career-defining ten seconds.
The junior season was 9–0 with a bonus point in every match. He won a second Big Ten title with a major decision over Mason Parris, then took the NCAA title from Parris in the final, and was awarded the Dan Hodge Trophy as the best college wrestler in the country, shared with Iowa's Spencer Lee.
At the rescheduled Olympic Trials he technical-falled his way to the best-of-three and beat Nick Gwiazdowski twice to make the team. He warmed up by winning the Pan American Championships without conceding much of anything.
In Tokyo he went through his first three opponents 23–0 — including the defending Olympic champion, Taha Akgül — and met the three-time reigning world champion Geno Petriashvili in the final. He led 4–0, was behind 5–8 with ninety seconds left, scored a takedown with ten seconds on the clock to make it 7–8, and scored another with half a second remaining to win it. A failed challenge from Petriashvili's corner made the final score 10–8.
He was the first American super-heavyweight to win freestyle Olympic gold since Bruce Baumgartner in 1992, and at twenty-one years, two months and six days the youngest ever to win the weight. Ten days later he told USA Wrestling he would not take the automatic place at the World Championships.
An Olympic champion signed to WWE went back to college wrestling on an NIL deal, and retired at the end of it.
In September 2021 it was announced that he had signed with WWE and would nevertheless return to college wrestling under a name, image and likeness deal. He swept the Big Ten Championships for a third conference title on a 13–0 season and was named Big Ten Athlete of the Year.
At the 2022 NCAA Championships in Detroit he opened with two technical falls, beat Northwestern's Lucas Davison and Penn State's Greg Kerkvliet by decision, and took the final from the previously unbeaten Cohlton Schultz of Arizona State, 6–2.
Then he did the backflip he had done all year, and left his shoes in the middle of the mat — the sport's way of announcing a retirement — and the arena stood up. He is the first and only heavyweight to have won the Dan Hodge Trophy more than once, and he took the Big Ten Medal of Honor for athletic and academic performance across his time at the university.
Professional wrestling, then professional football, neither of which he had done before and neither of which lasted.
He appeared at SummerSlam in August 2021, signed with WWE in September, and was drafted to the Raw brand the following month — only the second Olympic gold medallist the company had signed after Kurt Angle. At WrestleMania 38 he suplexed Chad Gable in front of a stadium.
His first actual match came at NXT The Great American Bash in July 2023, against Baron Corbin, and ended in a no contest after the two threw each other over the announce desk. The finish was criticised heavily, and the crowd booed him while cheering the villain. He was quietly removed from the roster, came back in January 2024 to win a dark match against Cedric Alexander, and was released with a group of others that May.
Three weeks later ESPN reported that he had signed a three-year deal with the Buffalo Bills as a defensive lineman, despite never having played football; his first time in a pair of cleats was the workout that got him the contract. He was released in August, before the season started.
He came back to Minnesota for one more season, became the first four-time Big Ten heavyweight champion, and lost the last college match he will ever wrestle.
On 9 March 2025 he beat the unbeaten defending champion Greg Kerkvliet to win a fourth Big Ten title — the first heavyweight ever to do it — and was named the tournament's most outstanding wrestler.
Two weeks later, in the NCAA final in Philadelphia, Wyatt Hendrickson of Oklahoma State beat him 5–4. He finished the tournament as the first five-time All-American in the history of Minnesota wrestling, and left the university with a 103–3 record, the best winning percentage the programme has ever had.
Four professional fights, four first-round finishes, and a UFC contract.
He had returned to freestyle in 2023, winning the US Open by a combined 44–1 and then Final X, before declining the World Championships place a second time. A submission-grappling debut against Craig Jones at the Craig Jones Invitational in August 2025 fell through when he withdrew with turf toe.
The fighting started in September 2025: Braden Peterson at LFA 217, stopped in the first round. Then a fifteen-second knockout in a Dirty Boxing bout in Nashville, a twenty-four-second knockout of Kevin Hein in Albuquerque, and Hugo Lezama stopped in Monterrey.
In March 2026 he signed a multi-match deal with Real American Freestyle and technical-falled Alexander Romanov 10–0 in the main event of RAF 09. In April the UFC announced his signing, and in July he knocked out Elisha Ellison in the first round on debut at UFC 329. Nobody has taken him out of the opening round yet.
He has not stopped wrestling to do it. The Real American Freestyle deal is a multi-match contract and he takes freestyle bouts between fights, which makes him the rare heavyweight running a professional MMA career and a live wrestling career at the same time. The next one on each is at the top of the MMA and wrestling pages.
Everything on this page is drawn from the published record. Nothing here is a quotation and nothing is inferred — where a fact would need a source this site cannot show you, it is not on the page.
Text drawn from Wikipedia is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Only three freely licensed photographs of him exist on Wikimedia Commons, which is why this page is mostly words — see the opponents page for the rest of what is licensed.