Former teen wrestling phenom Chance Marsteller back to chasing childhood dream after overcoming drug addiction: ‘I was confident that I would die’

Chandler Shane Marsteller was 10 years old when he sat in the kitchen of his family's farm in Pennsylvania and wrote his life goals on a piece of paper.

It was a concise list - “world champion, Olympic champion” – and the wrestling prodigy known as 'Chance' looked likely to achieve them while he was still a teenager.

That was before a drug addiction that crippled the young American's life a few years later.

Now 28 and drug-free for three years, he's heading to his career’s first senior world championships, the 2023 edition in Serbia, which is also a Paris 2024 Qualifier,** Marsteller is ready to fight for his childhood dream once again and help others start on the road to recovery**.

“It's tough to have hope when you truly believe there's not a whole lot of people out there that have gone through your situation and made it back,” Marsteller told Olympics.com. “So that's the biggest part of my story. Someone gave me hope once upon a time and I hope that I can give someone else that same feeling.”

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A childhood dream: World and Olympic glory

Eighteen years on, Marsteller still vividly remembers the day when he sat at the kitchen island counter and jotted down his biggest goals.

He had just gotten off the phone with his coach who encouraged him to pick one sport to focus on. Up until that time, Marsteller wrestled and played American football as an offensive tackle.

“I remember him telling me, ‘What are your goals?’ He was like, 'You could be pretty good at both these sports, or you can be really, really good in one. What do you want to do?’ I sat back and asked myself that,” Marsteller told us.

Wrestling emerged the winner: “I wrote down I wanted to be a world and Olympic gold medallist. And I didn't really write that many goals after that.”

Having inked his goals on paper, Marsteller set out relentlessly to achieve them.

“I absolutely loved the sport,” he said. “When I was 10, I was wrestling 12 and under brackets and 15 under brackets. And when I was 13, beating the best kids in the country in high school. It was that hunter mentality. The odds are stacked up against you and I appreciate those odds because I like to prove people wrong.”

By the time Marsteller entered high school, there was nothing left to prove. He was the undisputed king of wrestling, graduating with a perfect 166-0 track record and winning the Pennsylvania state championship four times.

His dazzling winning streak even earned him several magazine covers before he turned 18.

Becoming addicted: "It was always, 'what can you get away with?’"

Marsteller’s winning streak had a dark side as well.

Realising that no one came close to challenging him, maintaining healthy habits no longer seemed a necessity for Marsteller to keep beating his opponents.

“The hunter mentality? High school really wasn't like that,” he said.

“Out of those 166 matches there's maybe four that were tough. So as you're going through it, it kind of becomes monotonous and you lose a little bit of that purpose of, ‘What are we doing this for?’ And this is where my addiction started to spike. I was so confident that I knew what was going to happen, what the result was going to be on the mat, that I felt like I could get away with a bit in life as well.

“It was always, ‘What can you get away with? What can I get away with a million times?’”

Alcohol and drug use were an easy fix for the young wrestler. Marsteller had grown up seeing excessive alcohol consumption and dabbled in drug use from a young age.

He had his first smoke and drink around seventh grade and was trying different drugs once he got to high school.

“I probably tried just about everything throughout some point in time in high school. I was, for lack of better terms, a lunatic,” Marsteller said. “In high school it was a ‘work hard play hard’ mentality. Like, if I work this hard, I had to play a little bit harder.”

It was only when the drug use started affecting his performance on the mat that Marsteller got alarmed, but by then things had already spiralled out of control.

Drug addiction: Hitting rock bottom

Alcohol, opioids, fentanyl, and heroin were Marsteller’s substances of choice.

And as he entered college, his drug addictions intensified.

“Every day something had to be in my system and I had to be out of my state of reality and not be me for a couple seconds each day or minutes or hours,” he recalled. “I would rather go find my fix than go to practice.”

Aside from the occasional missed practice, everything looked fine on the surface. Marsteller graduated with the top male GPA, he was still an All American, and his two sons – born while he was in college – were healthy.

“So, I'm telling myself, ‘I'm doing all of this, so I can keep doing this. I'm managing’. And it's not the case,” he said. “I wasn't anywhere near my ceiling. I wasn't anywhere near scratching the surface of what I know I was capable of.”

The atmosphere at home was also strained. While Marsteller was present at family events, he was finding excuses to escape for a few minutes and lying about his addiction to his wife and sons.

“I was always physically there. I just wasn't there emotionally, spiritually. I didn't have a whole lot to give to people from the inside of me,” he recalled. “All I was doing was taking. I was taking from everybody else. I was taking people's life energy."

Marsteller’s first stint in rehab, in 2016, came after he was arrested on assault charges in college. Released after 30 days, he returned to his old habits.

In 2020, he went to rehab again after wrecking two cars while driving under the influence, and this time he was determined to give up the drugs for good.

“I was confident in the fact that I would die,” Marsteller said. “I had seen a jail cell. I have been to rehab already. I was going back. I was confident if I got back out and decided to live the way I was living, I was likely to die at some point due to these drugs.”

A brother living the Olympic dream

As Marsteller continued to work through his addiction, another family member embarked on the dream he had written down on that scrap of paper as a 10-year-old boy.

His stepbrother, John Stefanowicz, qualified to compete in wrestling at Tokyo 2020, held in 2021.

Marsteller also had a chance to qualify for the Games, at the Olympic trials qualifier in December 2019, but he medically forfeited out of the match – that was seven months before he quit drugs.

“When my brother made the Olympic team. I was the most jealous person in the world. I've never said that to him, so he'll probably hear it through this,” Marsteller said.

“I was jealous because I wrote down these goals when I was 10. I don't think this was in my brother's thoughts ever. I don't know if he ever even wanted to be great at wrestling...I don't think it was as important as it was to me when I was a kid.

“It hurt. Not watching him do it hurt me, but not reaching my realisation.”

As Stefanowicz battled to a 12th place finish in the men’s Greco-Roman 87kg class at Tokyo 2020, and nine other USA wrestlers won medals, Marsteller followed the competition from afar.

From recovery to being a role model for youth wrestlers

While seeing people drinking or taking drugs was part of Marsteller’s life from an early age, there was nobody in his close circle to set an example for how to recover from addiction.

What helped was hearing a TedX Talk by former BMX racing teen phenom Tony Hoffman. Like Marsteller, Hoffman was addicted to heroin and went to jail, but he managed to turn his life around and went to the Olympic Games, at Rio 2016, as a coach.

“I broke down because he was the first person I ever, in my entire life, fully related to. I haven't heard my story through somebody else's mouth before. When I heard Tony on this TEDx Talk, I broke down,” Marsteller said.

Marsteller now wants to make sure other teenage wrestlers do not feel as alone as he did.

He coaches a youth club in Oxford, Pennsylvania and aims to lead by example.

“I'm not afraid [and don't try] to hide what I did from my athletes. Most of my athletes are high school, middle school age, so they're at the age of where I was when I was using,” Marsteller said.

“[I tell them] 'nothing you tell me is ever going to shock me, from the extracurriculars to what's going on at home. Definitely nothing's going to shock me, so let's talk it out'.”

Dreaming like a 10-year-old, again

On 10 June 2023, Marsteller was on the mat in New Jersey for another shot at his childhood dream – with the teens from his wrestling club watching and cheering on.

The event was Final X with a spot on USA’s team at the 2023 World Wrestling Championships as the ultimate prize. Marsteller’s opponent in the men’s 79kg was one of the most successful wrestlers of all time, Olympic and world champion Jordan Burroughs.

The year before, Burroughs beat him at the same event before going on to win his sixth world title.

In 2023, however, it was Marsteller celebrating the best-of-three series win in a perfect comeback on his road to redemption. The victory qualified him for his first senior world championships, being held from 16 to 24 September in Belgrade, Serbia, a Paris 2024 Olympic qualifier, available live on Olympic Channel.

He'll compete in the men's 79kg, which is not an Olympic weight class, but Marsteller plans to move up to 86kg for Paris 2024.

For the American, it is one step closer to realising the two goals – to become a world and Olympic champion – that he set as a 10-year-old boy.

“Those were the two I wrote down and nothing about state championships or NCAA titles, and here we are today. I'm still chasing down that dream,” Marsteller said. “I'm hard-headed, so it's really hard to let go of those dreams when you truly believe that you can achieve them.”

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