Olympic wrestler 'lucky' to be alive

DENVER, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- Olympic wrestler Rulon Gardner must like to live dangerously, but even he admits he's lucky after surviving a weekend plane crash on the Utah-Arizona border.

The Olympic champion and two others were picked up by a fisherman Sunday suffering from hypothermia after swimming in 44-degree water for an hour and surviving a night without shelter, The Denver Post said.

"If these guys were a cat with nine lives, they just used up three of them," Steven Luckesen, a ranger at the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area said.

Gardner, 35, won a gold medal in Greco-Roman wrestling at the 2000 Sydney Games. In 2002, he lost a toe to frostbite while snowmobiling in Wyoming. He was hit by a car while riding a motorcycle to practice in Colorado in 2004 and when he was a child he impaled himself with an arrow during a third-grade show-and-tell.

"I think I'm really lucky after everything I have been through," Gardner told CNN.