Tina George wrestler.(Team USA)

Byline: Linda Lee

We are on a yellow mat at the Fort Carson army training facility near Colorado Springs, and Tina George is showing me how she can topple me like an oak-crouching, grabbing my left leg, pulling me off balance. George is five feet tall, 25 years old, a specialist in the U.S. Army, and a silver medalist in her weight class at the world championships for the last two years. I am not. "It's easier to throw bigger people," she says, "because they can't catch themselves"-a theory she was able to test when a man twice her size heard that she wrestled and dared her to challenge him at the supermarket. And so she did. "I try not to wrestle like that, but I will throw someone down in the chip aisle if I have to," she says.

George, who is known for her explosiveness and impeccable technique, may not have to prove her point between snack-food shelves for much longer. As a top contender for Team USA, along with the fearless Patricia Miranda (also pictured here), she may have the world as her witness come August, when women wrestle in the Olympics for the first time-thus reaching a new benchmark in sports.

"Like most breakthroughs, it empowers women and makes them feel, you know, we can do anything," says Terry Steiner, U.S.A. Wrestling Women's National Coach. "People ask, 'Why women's wrestling?' and I say, 'Why not?' It teaches women to deal with adversity. It's a sport with a lot of ups and downs, and you're out there alone. You can't blame losing on something else."

But wrestling does violate almost every concept of girlish modesty. Some 240,000 high school boys wrestled in the 2002-2003 school year, while only 5,000 girls participated, though that number did go up 200 percent from five years ago. In wrestling, your face may wind up in someone else's crotch, and there are moves like the "high crotch takedown." Danielle Hobeika, a 25-year-old wrestler who trained with the men's team at Harvard University, says, "A lot of people get intimidated by that, like, 'Someone's grabbing my crotch!' But you just have to be comfortable with your body."

At the Olympics ...