There are lives so incredible that they seem made to become a film. This is what Ben Affleck and Matt Damon must have thought at the end of 2022, when, after finishing production on Air, the film based on Michael Jordan’s NBA debut, they reached an agreement to make a film based on the true story of another athlete, certainly less famous than Jordan but equally strong and determined. And this is how Unstoppable was born, a film released on 16 January 2025 on Prime Video and based on the true life of Antony Robles, a university Olympic wrestling champion despite the disadvantage of having only one leg. Here then is a summary of Antony Robles’ biography.
The true story of Antony Robles
Antony was born on July 15, 1988 in California, and for unknown reasons was born without a leg up to the hip. Since he was three years old he has renounced the use of prosthetics to replace his leg, a complicated solution in itself due to the total lack of the limb.
And so, when he was still a small child, he started moving around with crutches, and doing special exercises to strengthen the rest of his body. With amazing results, so much so that at the age of eleven he set his school’s record for push-ups.
The encounter with wrestling (not to be confused with the show of the same name, here the struggle is absolutely real) occurred two years later, when Antony was 13 and went to see an older cousin of his who practiced this sport.
But it was in high school that his experience as a wrestler really began. The first year, due to the fact that he was about five kilos lighter than other wrestlers in his weight class, Robles won 5 matches and lost 8, ranking last in the rankings of the city of Mesa, Arizona.
But Antony did not give up, and by combining the advantage of a very firm hand grip, developed thanks to the use of crutches, with a period of high intensity training he significantly improved his results in the following years.
He invented new moves to take advantage of his higher-than-normal center of gravity, and already in his second year of high school he placed sixth in all of Arizona. In the last two years of high school he became unbeatable, achieving 96 victories and zero defeats.
However, Antony was unable to get admitted to the colleges he had chosen to continue his wrestling activity, and so he enrolled at Arizona State University.
At university Antony found very tough opponents, and in his first year he narrowly missed the All-America recognition given to the best athletes in the USA. But even in this case Antony did not give up, and at the end of his college years, in 2011, his score indicated 122 victories and 23 defeats, three Pacific Coast championship titles and three All-America inclusions.
After university Antony left his competitive career and wrote an autobiography, the one from which the film coming out on Prime Video is based. But Robles has certainly not lost his energy: so much so that in 2018, twenty years after the first record, he set another one, with 62 pull-ups in one minute. Truly… unstoppable.
