Ari Taub

Ari Michael Taub (born January 19, 1971) is a Canadian Olympic Greco-Roman wrestler. He won two gold medals at the 1989 Maccabiah Games in Israel, and a gold medal at the 2007 Commonwealth Wrestling Championship. He competed for Canada in the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Biography

Taub was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, later lived in Vancouver, and is Jewish. He grew up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and went to Henry Wise Wood High School. He attended York University and Simon Fraser University (BBA, Finance '94) and UBC Law School ('96), and is an attorney. He resides in Calgary, where he runs his own law firm, specializing in corporate and real-estate law, Taub Law.

Career

At the World Wrestling Championships, he came in 5th in Freestyle Cadets at 95 kg in 1987, and 5th in Freestyle Espoir in 1991.

At the 1989 Maccabiah Games in Israel, he won two gold medals. In the Pan American Wrestling Championships, he won a silver medal in 1992, and bronze medals in 2006 and 2007.

He quit wrestling in 1992, when he was 22 years old, for 10 years, after a diagnosis of osteophytes (bone spurs) and a spinal column injury involving a narrowing of the spinal canal, which could turn him into a quadriplegic if he continued wrestling. In the 1/8 finals, he was defeated by Mihály Deák-Bárdos of Hungary, and finished 16th.

Taub and a partner created Calgary's only amateur MMA fight TV and live event series, Hard Knocks Fighting Championship, in March 2009. He is the founder and CEO of Hard Knocks Fighting network.