Ronda Jean Rousey (born February 1, 1987) is an American mixed martial artist, judoka, and actress. Rousey was the first U.S. woman to earn an Olympic medal in judo (Bronze), which she won at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. She is the former UFC Women's Bantamweight Champion, as well as the last Strikeforce Women's Bantamweight Champion. She won twelve consecutive MMA fights, six in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), before suffering her first and only loss to Holly Holm; she won eleven of those fights in the first round, nine of them by armbar submission. Rousey trains under Gokor Chivichyan of the Hayastan MMA Academy, and Edmond Tarverdyan of the Glendale Fighting Club. In 2015, she was the third most searched person on Google.
As of March 2016, Rousey is ranked the #2 female bantamweight fighter in the world according to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and #3 by Sherdog. Sherdog and Fight Matrix also list her as the #4 pound-for-pound Women's MMA fighter.
In May 2015, two magazines ranked Rousey as the most "dominant" active athlete. In September 2015, voters in an online ESPN poll selected Rousey as the Best Female Athlete Ever. Later that month, she claimed to be the UFC's highest paid fighter, male or female. Rousey's first feature film role was the 2014 film The Expendables 3. In 2015, she had roles in the films Furious 7 and Entourage.
Rousey was born in Riverside, California, the youngest of three daughters of AnnMaria De Mars (née Waddell) and Ron Rousey, after whom Rousey was named. Her mother had a decorated Judo career and was the first U.S. citizen to win a World Judo Championship (in 1984). Her maternal grandfather was Venezuelan, and was of part Afro-Venezuelan ancestry; her maternal great-grandfather was Dr. Alfred E Waddell, a Trinidadian native who emigrated to Canada and became one of the first black physicians in North America. Her other roots are English and Polish. Her stepfather is an aerospace engineer. Her biological father, having broken his back sledding with his daughters and having learned that he would be a paraplegic, committed suicide in 1995, when Rousey was eight years old. AnnMaria pursued her Ph.D. in educational psychology at the University of California, Riverside as her daughters grew up.
For the first six years of her life, Rousey struggled with speech and could not form an intelligible sentence due to apraxia, a neurological childhood speech sound disorder. This speech disorder was attributed to being born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck at birth. When Rousey was three years old, her mother and father moved from Riverside, California, to Jamestown, North Dakota, to obtain intensive speech therapy with specialists at Minot State University.
Rousey dropped out of high school and later earned a G.E.D. She was raised in Southern California and Jamestown, North Dakota, retiring from her judo career at 21 and starting her MMA career at 22 when she realized that she did not want to spend her life in a conventional field of work.
