Kennedy Blades

Kennedy Blades (born September 4, 2003) is an American wrestler. She qualified to represent the United States at the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Biography
Blades is from Chicago, Illinois. She and her younger sister, Korina, started taking Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes when she was four years old. She later switched to wrestling at age seven, joining a small club in the area. As there were not many girls she could wrestle against, she often trained against boys. She won several championships competing against boys, including becoming the first female to win the IKWF Illinois state title, in 2016.

Blades and her sister, also a wrestler, attended Wyoming Seminary in Pennsylvania, the first American high school to have a girls wrestling program. 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. Blades won the U.S. cadet national championship in 2018, and the U16 national championship, U17 national championship, and junior national championship in 2019.

At age 17, Blades finished runner-up at the U.S. trials for the 2020 Summer Olympics, losing to Tamyra Mensah-Stock, who went on to win the Olympic gold medal. After she graduated from high school, she joined the wrestling club Sunkist Kids in Arizona and enrolled at Arizona State University. Blades was the gold medalist at the 2021 U20 world championship and later won silver at the 2023 U23 world championship. She also won gold at the 2023 Ibrahim Moustafa Tournament. In 2024, she defeated 2020 Olympic medalist Adeline Gray at the U.S. Olympic trials, thus qualifying for the 2024 Summer Olympics.