Sherdog’s Top 10: Successful Olympic Crossovers

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3. Mark Coleman

An All-American and national champion at Ohio State University, a Pan-American champion and a silver medalist at the world championships in 1991, Coleman’s next logical step was a berth at the Olympic Games. The Ohioan got his chance in Barcelona, Spain, in 1992 and secured a seventh-place finish at 100 kilograms.

“The Hammer” made a successful transition to MMA, capping a victory in the UFC 10 tournament with a vicious knockout over Don Frye and easily taking the UFC 11 four-man tournament. He submitted Dan Severn at UFC 12 to win the inaugural UFC heavyweight championship, but followed it with a brutal four-fight losing streak that culminated in a heel-hook loss to Japanese wrestler Nobuhiko Takada at Pride 5 that was almost certainly a work.

Coleman came back from that rough stretch to reassert himself as one of MMA’s true greats with his performance in the 2000 Pride open weight grand prix -- one of the all-time epic events in the history of the sport. The Ohioan spent the full 15 minutes crushing Akira Shoji, effectively got a bye when Kazuyuki Fujita’s corner threw in the towel and then utterly destroyed Igor Vovchanchyn in the final to win the tournament. Another decade of up-and-down performances followed, but it was the run in 2000 that cemented Coleman as one of the legends of the sport.

It is frankly impossible to overstate Coleman’s influence on the future development of MMA. Even though he was 31 years of age and a little past his athletic prime when he made his debut, he was the sport’s first truly freakish athlete, with unbelievable explosiveness, strength and size relative to his generation of competitors. Far more important, Coleman essentially invented striking on the ground, at least as modern fans understand it. “The Godfather of Ground and Pound” left a lasting impact on his second sport during his hall-of-fame career.

Number 2 » Ronda Rousey