Andrew Crighton
Life Editor
Every student on campus has a story, and this is Kalon Ludvigson’s.
Kalon Ludvigson, originally from Sterling, Utah, is a junior at ISU currently in the process of applying for entrance into the College of Pharmacy. Before he was a full time student, he competed on the international circuit of gymnastics, and became the most decorated tumbling athlete in the nation. He holds 20 World Cup and World Championship Medals, and also set the World Record for Difficulty for his event in 2008 and 2011.
Ludvigson started gymnastics at 8 years old when his mother, herself a gymnast, enrolled him in classes due to his knack for doing flips and rolls on the trampoline.
When Ludvigson was 15 he was named to the U.S. National Team.
“When I started working with the Nationals coach, I had no idea what to expect,” Ludvigson said. He trained twice a day for six hours, six days a week while attending a public high school.
“The school I went to worked with me to where the time I spent training counted as electives, so I didn’t have to take P.E. or gym,” Ludvigson said. “I would train, then go to my classes and get out around 12 and then I would train more.”
The levels of competition in gymnastics are classified 1 through 10, after which is the ‘elite’ category. At the age of 15, Ludvigson was the youngest member to ever be on the National Elite team, however he was still a year too young to compete as a senior, even though he trained on the senior team.
The next year, 2004, Ludvigson was old enough to compete as a Senior Elite, and traveled to the Pan American Games and the Indo Pacific Championships, where he took first place at both, winning his first international competitions at the age of 16.
“I just kind of went and ended up winning, and I just thought it was a fluke.”
In 2006, Ludvigson won his first U.S. National Title in tumbling, and hasn’t lost a U.S. competition throughout the rest of his career, which ended in 2013.
The main regret that Ludvigson has is that he never celebrated his wins.
“I never really focused on the moment; I guess that’s one of my regrets looking back.”
Once you win, and continue to win, you never take the time to think about the moment, you simply start thinking about what you need to work on once you get back home.
In 2009 Ludvigson won his first World Cup in Salzgitter, Germany, the first time an American won in 10 years. Even the moment of winning such a prestigious medal was pushed aside to focus on the search for perfection.
“I remember going up on the medal stand, and hearing the national anthem and thinking that it was really cool, but then I immediately snapped back into it.”
Throughout his career, Ludvigson was either in the number one spot, or very near it, and competing at that level comes with an extremely high level of stress. Seconds, and tenths of a point can mean the difference between first and second place medals.
“You can say, ‘Yeah I’ve done this a million times in the gym,’ but it comes down to doing it this one time, and it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it before, it comes down to this one time.”
Ludvigson says that his greatest accomplishment was winning the World Cup Series in 2011, a title won by accumulating the most points in all five World Cup events held in that year.
Also in 2011, the Kalon Ludvigson Invitational was created to honor him and his accomplishments in the sport. The KLI is an annual competition in Utah, and has become the largest invitational competition in the U.S. Ludvigson attends every year to watch the competitors and sign autographs.
In August of 2013 Ludvigson’s career came to a sudden and severe end. During summer training in Virginia, Ludvigson decided to do one more run of a new combination.
“I just took off and it felt kind of funny in the air. I landed on my hands and knees but my chin was tucked in just enough to where my neck was dislocated and pushed against my spinal cord, and then just kind of immediate paralysis.”
The accident left him paralyzed from the chest down.
When asked if he was ever haunted by the fact that it was the ‘just one more’ that caused his injury, he replied “No,” and explained that he was lucky in that aspect. While talking with people in similar circumstances, there are often stories of being kept awake at night with memories of car accidents and an infinite amount of ‘what ifs’.
Two years after his accident, there aren’t a lot of regrets from the past. Part of being an athlete is working through difficulty; it’s a part of the drive for perfection.
“I think having that mentality and that drive has really helped, because I’m in this situation now and I’ve just got to try and make the best of it and move on.”
While the hardest part of his gymnastics career was dealing with stress and constantly working to improve whenever possible, the hardest thing after the accident has been “…Life in general.” Going to class full-time and taking notes are two specific things that Ludvigson named. After he recovered, Ludvigson continued his studies in the pre-pharmacy program, but is now able to focus full-time instead of part-time with a semester off in between on occasion.
“I’ve always been really interested in chemistry and biology, and how chemicals in a pill can stop pain or cure illnesses.”
Although he can no longer compete, Ludvigson is far from uninvolved in the sport that he devoted so much of his life to. He is part owner of a gym in town and is an assistant coach for Team Revolution. Ludvigson spends as much time at the gym as possible, and tries to go to every competition that his team attends.
Ludvigson is also the Athlete Representative for USA Gymnastics.
In a lifetime spent with gymnastics, and learning how to cope with a life changing injury, Kalon Ludvigson has learned how to ‘tumble’ with grace.
