Alex Lloyd lay on his back on a sweaty, crowded wrestling mat underneath the Xcel Energy Center seats after his Class 3A 145-pound semifinals victory Saturday, exhausted and satisfied at the same time.
This certainly wasn't an extravagant place to lay his head. It may not even have been comfortable. Considering Lloyd's past, however, there was no place he would rather be.
The heavily muscled Shakopee junior later won his second consecutive 145-pound state championship, worlds away from the Russian orphanage in suburban Moscow where he spent the first six years of his life and where Bill and Karen Lloyd found him and his younger brother, Jake.
"I'm very lucky, very fortunate," Lloyd said. "If I hadn't been adopted, I don't know where I'd be."
Lloyd, whose given name is Denis Alexandrovic, remembers little about life in Russia. He has no inkling who his parents were or why they chose to give him up.
"I remember three buildings at the orphanage and in between two of them was this big flower garden, surrounded by metal cages and stuff," he recalled. "When my dad came to adopt us, I remember going on a bunch of bike rides with him."
Bill Lloyd was a wrestling coach, so he introduced Alex to wrestling in second grade.
"For the first year, year and a half, I was very bad," he said. "But my dad and I kept working and I loved it and just wanted to keep getting better."
