As girls, Jamie Reed Kovac ’01 CE, M.Eng. ’02 and her three sisters would turn their backyard into NBC’s hit show American Gladiator, where regular folks competed against muscular, cocky, warrior men and women in an arena, cheered by crowds.

Kovac would step up, flex, and glare at her challengers—she was a gladiator, maybe Lace, described by the announcer as feminine yet tough and strong. Her sisters would be challengers, trying not to be eliminated, aiming for the championship. The girls would pummel each other, wrestle, joust with brooms, turn the monkey bars of their jungle gym into “Hang Tough,” where combatants attacked with their legs while hanging from rings.

Jump to January 2008. On the TV screen now, Kovac tosses back her brown hair, squares her shoulders and washboard stomach, places hands on hips and stares haughtily. Gray letters settle beneath her image: Fury.

Kovac was a gladiator for real last winter, on NBC’s new American Gladiators, where now the goal was to keep ordinary folks from winning $100,000. Some might call it destiny. In the senior yearbook, her high school classmates in Newport, Ore. had deemed her “Most Likely to Be an American Gladiator.”

Kovac is also a structural engineer, a project manager, and designer for Weidlinger Associates in Manhattan, designing buildings. She competes in figure, a sort of body-building, although she aims more toward the modeling side. She’s a wife, married to Frank Kovac ’00, former Cornell hockey player, now a trader for Deutsche Bank.

This balance of careers is nothing new. The Kovacs work hard and play hard: tennis, windsurfing, mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding. A few of her civil engineering professors told Jamie to quit sports and grow up, as she recalls it, but she didn’t.

She did quit the Cornell softball team but took up pole vaulting instead, because her younger sister Niki (now an Olympic hopeful) was doing it and the event’s blend of speed, power, and daring looked like fun. Jamie competed for two seasons and set school records indoors and out.

Track coach Nathan Taylor still marvels that she learned a new sport at the Division I level.

“There was a huge learning curve but Jamie had the basic criteria: fast, powerful, nearly fearless,” Taylor says. “She was very dedicated. She did in one year what should take five years.”

Kovac’s star turn was cut short by a knee injury in the seventh episode, the semifinals. But not before she was able to relive her girlhood.

She heard about the new American Gladiators—a bigger and wilder version of the old show, which ran from 1989 to 1996 and starred another Cornellian, Lee Reherman ’88, as Hawk—but missed the tryout in Brooklyn. Then she found herself in Las Vegas for a figure photo shoot and had another chance. Kovac went through the tryout, then sent in an audition tape and waited.

The tape in itself is a gladiator story. She was carrying the tape in a purse while waiting for a train when a man grabbed it. Kovac chased the thief for blocks, yelling, and he dropped it. “[Pursuing him] was really stupid,” she says, “but I didn’t think about it. All I thought was, ‘My God, he’s got my stuff.’ ”

NBC summoned Kovac to Culver City, Calif., for seven weeks, and Weidlinger gave her time off. She trained, did photo shoots, and taped an advertisement, then the show’s eight episodes were taped over three weeks.

The show’s massive set—the apparatus set above a giant water tank, surrounded by crowds, with spotlights lighting up everything—gave Kovac a taste of life as a pro athlete. Two of her favorite events were “Earthquake” (wrestling on a tilting platform) and “Hang Tough” (preventing contestants from crossing over a pool via hanging rings).

At one point, a producer urged her to toy with a contestant, to make good TV. “She’s bigger than me,” Kovac says, “and she’s hungry, she wants $100,000. Toy with her?”

Kovac tore major ligaments in her right knee while competing at “Power Ball”—stopping contestants from carrying balls to vertical pods. Her feet stuck on the stage floor as she turned. She finished the game but the damage was severe.

After surgery in January, she attacked her rehab regimen for two hours per day, aiming for a spot on Season 2 of the show. She was walking in a month. She had no desire to sit still.
Life, after all, is balance.

—Scott Conroe