Fab foursome of former SFU wrestlers grapple with success at Paris Olympics

A quartet of former SFU wrestlers are grappling for gold at the upcoming 2024 Summer Games. 

Justina Di Stasio and Ana Godinez Gonzalez will compete for Canada, while Dom Parrish and Olympic gold medalist Helen Maroulis have been named to Team U.S.A. for the upcoming Paris Olympics, held July 26 to Aug. 11, 2024. 

“It’s taken a long time, but I feel like it was meant to happen the way it did,” says Di Stasio, a first-time Olympian who wrestled at SFU from 2010 to 2014 and is now an assistant coach for the university. “I feel much more ready now than I would have at a younger age.”

And she’s not alone. Dom Parrish, who wrestled at SFU from 2015 to 2019, attended the Tokyo 2020 Games as a training partner for Team U.S.A. She says she eager to compete herself this time around.   

“I kind of got the inside deal on how it runs,” says Parrish of the Tokyo Games. “It was a great experience, even though I was there as a training partner. I’m excited to go and compete. It’s given me a lot of focus going into these last three months.”

Ana Godinez Gonzalez, who grew up playing rugby and started wrestling to get better at tackling on the rugby pitch, says going from wrestling for fun, to competing at the Olympics, is a huge jump.

“I’m super excited,” says Godinez Gonzalez, whose sister Karla will also be travelling to the Games as her training partner. “I never imagined this would happen, but I know that when I really like something, I do it at 1,000 per cent.”

This is the first Olympics for Di Stasio, a two-time medalist at the Pan American Games (silver, Toronto 2015; gold, Lima 2019). She also won gold at the 2022 Commonwealth Games and won the World Championship in 2018.

Di Stasio wrestled at SFU from 2010 to 2014 and graduated with a degree in English, which she followed with her professional development program (PDP) from the Faculty of Education. She is starting her full-time teaching career this September. 

Di Stasio, who grew up in Coquitlam, but now calls East Vancouver home, began wrestling in middle school and high school for fun. She was a walk-on to the SFU team. 

“It was a big change for me, because I hadn’t taken wrestling too seriously as a kid, but SFU was a very welcoming environment. Right off the bat, I was on a team wrestling with people who were already wrestling at the highest levels, winning junior worlds.  

“It was a very quick introduction to how serious wrestling was and a really good example of what it took to be really good at it – immediately.”

Di Stasio is also an assistant coach at SFU and helped coach her fellow Olympians, Parrish and Godinez Gonzalez. 

Parrish got her wrestling start in the sixth grade when a classmate signed her up for a demonstration in a P.E. class.

“My friend signed me up on the clipboard and I thought I would get in trouble if I didn’t go, because they had my email.” 

Her dad had wrestled in high school, and he helped her choose SFU after looking at wrestling schools on the West Coast and discovering that U.S. Olympic-gold medalist Helen Maroulis was an SFU alumni. 

“For me, it was a big learning curve,” Parrish says of her SFU wrestling career. “There were some girls there who were going to give it their all – physically, technically. It was a bit rough. 

“But it taught me that if you want to see improvements, you have got to put yourself in those tough situations and give yourself a chance to grow.” 

Parrish wrestled at SFU from 2015 to 2019 and won the Patricia Miranda Medal for most outstanding collegiate wrestler in 2019. She also won the 2022 World Championship at 53 kg.

Godinez Gonzalez, who came to Canada from Mexico at age 7, got a late start in wrestling, getting her first taste of it at 16.  

“Wrestling wasn’t very serious for me,” says Godinez Gonzalez, who came to SFU for a single year to wrestle against higher competition in the NCAA. “I was in rugby, and I just love sports. I started wrestling for fun with my sister to get better at tackling for rugby.

“It’s a big jump to go from wrestling being a fun thing to do, to the Olympics. It’s a huge jump.”

In 2022 and 2023, she won back-to-back gold medals at the Pan American Championships and won silver at the Commonwealth Games. She also won a U23 world title in 2021 and a U23 bronze in 2022. 

Her sister Lupita competes in the UFC. Her sister Karla also wrestled at SFU and is going to Paris this summer as her training partner.

“At least Karla will be there with me as she was my first ever wrestling partner.”