ATHENS - Time should not be the ultimate factor in the success or failure of a cause. Instead, a movement should be measured in its converts.
In the skeptics who become believers. In the doubters who come to understand the call. In a 60-year-old physician, and father of four, rising to his feet to cheer at a women's wrestling match.
The Summer Games became more diverse Sunday morning. They also became more rowdy, bloody and sweaty, and that's not such a bad thing.
Women's wrestling made its Olympic debut at precisely 9:30 a.m. The official results will say it started on time, although you certainly could argue it is late by any number of centuries.
Go back to the Ancient Games in Greece where women were not just forbidden to compete, but to watch. Violators occasionally were tossed from cliffs.
Go back to the modern birth of the Olympics in 1896 in Athens, when women's sports had little room in this world.
Go back a month or so when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced the U.S. women's team with some lame remark about nude wrestling.
So understand, this will not catch on quickly. It's a lot of bodies shy of phenomenon and a few devotees short of cult. On Sunday, the stands were half empty and so was the locker room. There are only four weight classes and no method for seeding, so two of the best heavyweights met in the first round.
Still, it is a start. A point of entry. Mostly it is a cause, disguised as a competition.
"So many young girls can see now that it's really a legitimate sport and see it as a possibility," said Alaska native Tela O'Donnell, who failed to advance after losing her second match. "There are lots of avenues to learn from in life, but I've gained so much from wrestling.
"If seeing wrestling at the Olympics gives that opportunity to other girls, I think it would be so neat."
It will be a process. Of that there is no doubt. The idea of girls with bruises, mat burns and blood dripping down their faces is not easy to accept. Just ask the physician sitting in the middle of the Ano Liossia Hall.
Jose Miranda was not necessarily alarmed when his daughter Patricia came to him as an eighth-grader and said she was going out for the boys wrestling team. His children always had one flaky idea or another, and usually they were forgotten as easily as the previous page of a calendar.
But this one did not go away. Patricia continued to show up at wrestling practice, and Jose began to get concerned.
"She'd come home," he said, "with boo-boos on her face."
Jose, who fled Brazil in 1970 to escape a military dictatorship, did not come to California so his daughter could be abused in the name of sport.
They argued. He forbade her from attending meets. There is a story of Patricia showing up to wrestle at a tournament and finding her father had beaten her there and withdrawn her name. Jose says the story is not true. Patricia suggests her father might have a faulty memory.
"Most of the time, he would just show up and take me home," said Patricia, whose mother passed away when she was 10. "He didn't want to mess with officials. It was usually a battle between the two of us."
Jose finally caught a break when Patricia developed a back problem. He took her to a doctor, expecting to be told she should give up wrestling.
"The doctor was from Iran and wrestling is like soccer there. They love wrestling," Jose said, chuckling at the memory. "He was excited when he found out Patricia was a wrestler."
Eventually, Jose hatched a new plan. Patricia always had been a bright girl, but she never applied herself in school. If she got straight A's, he said, she would be allowed to wrestle in high school.
"I didn't have anything better to offer her," he said. "She wanted to wrestle."
Patricia graduated from high school with a 4.0 grade-point average and was named one of the captains of the boys wrestling team by her senior year.
She went on to Stanford where she earned degrees in economics and international policy. She continued to wrestle, but the gap in strength between her and her male competitors was becoming extreme.
Miranda would go weeks in practice without scoring a point. She finally made the Stanford varsity team as a senior and won three matches - a forfeit, a victory against another woman and against a junior college man.
Accepted at Yale law school, she put off school for one year to train for the Olympics. She is scheduled to start classes a week from today.
In the meantime, Miranda won all three of her matches Sunday and advanced to today's semifinal.
Watching from the lower level of the bleachers was her father, sister, two brothers and stepmother. So how does Dr. Miranda feel about wrestling today?
He still doesn't understand the sport. He's more interested in her upcoming enrollment at Yale. And he's still worried about the boo-boos.
But he's come to realize wrestling has helped make his daughter the person she is today. And, for that, he is grateful.
"What this Olympics means for girls is possibility," Jose Miranda said. "It's important for girls that they know they can do whatever they want, if they put their minds to it."
