Biography
Blades is from Chicago, Illinois. [1] She and her younger sister, Korina, started taking Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes when she was four years old. [2] She later switched to wrestling at age seven, joining a small club in the area. [2] As there were not many girls she could wrestle against, she often trained against boys. [2] She won several championships competing against boys as a youth wrestler, including becoming the first female to win the IKWF Illinois state title, in 2016. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Blades and her sister, also a wrestler, attended Wyoming Seminary in Pennsylvania, the first American high school to have a girls wrestling program. [2] She said that "because there weren't any women's high school wrestling teams in the nation, we had to travel around the world to get competition" – while in high school, she competed against wrestlers from countries including Japan, Russia, Estonia, Austria and Sweden. [2] Blades won the U.S. Cadet national championship in 2018, and the U16 national championship, U17 national championship, and Junior national championship in 2019. [1]
At age 17, Blades finished runner-up at the U.S. trials for the 2020 Summer Olympics, losing to Adeline Gray, who went on to win the Olympic silver medal. [3] After she graduated from high school, she joined the wrestling club Sunkist Kids in Arizona and enrolled at Arizona State University. [2] Blades was the gold medalist at the 2021 U20 world championship and later won silver at the 2023 U23 world championship. [1] She also won gold at the 2023 Ibrahim Moustafa Tournament. [1] In 2024, she defeated 2020 Olympic silver medalist Adeline Gray at the U.S. Olympic trials, thus qualifying for the 2024 Summer Olympics where she won the silver medal. [5] [6] Blades won the silver medal at the 2024 Summer Olympics, in the women's 76 kg weight class, which was the United States's 1,000th silver medal. [7] [8] She transferred to the University of Iowa in July 2025. [9]
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