Kurt Angle: Olympic gold was his defining moment

Nice interview with TNA star Kurt Angle on WEEI.com. Angle, a former WWE and TNA world champion, not surprisingly lists his 1996 Olympic gold medal as the highlight of his career.

“Without a doubt, it’s the top,” Angle said. “There was just all the hard work and there were all the guys I trained with for 10 hours a day every single day. Losing Dave [Schultz] and my dad, and everything my family sacrificed — they don’t have a lot of money, but they showed up at every match I had — there was just a lot of hard work, not just on my part, but from my whole family. It was the happiest day of my life, but it was also the most depressing day of my life.”

Angle said in the interview that he feel into depression after the ’96 Olympics for reasons that he has not been able to address.

“How do I go above what I did? That’s a lot of the reason I’ve had so many personal problems. I was only trying to outdo my Olympic gold medal experience, and nothing would give me the satisfaction,” Angle said.

Angle admitted in the interview that he had never watched pro wrestling before he got into the business.

“But I became obsessed by it,” Angle said. “I studied it, worked it, watched it. I was watching old tapes and anything I could to get better. I was just a really good listener. I had Triple H, Undertaker, [Steve] Austin, and The Rock telling me what to do. Instead of ignoring them, I kept an open mind. The more I did that, the quicker I learned.”

The hardest part of the transition was realizing that he needed to start over.

“What I did is I forgot everything I had learned for the past 25 years,” Angle said. “Nobody scored on me, nobody did anything to me in amateur wrestling, so I had to learn how to be humbled. Once I did that, it was easier for me to learn.”