Olympic hopeful dies during Vegas New Year's

Tod Surmon, 26, of Menlo Park, Calif., landed on his head and died shortly after midnight after apparently grabbing an electrical wire attached to the pole near the Paris Las Vegas hotel, witnesses told police.

His family and friends said Surmon, who grew up in Albany, Ore., had always been a daredevil.

"He had an invincible attitude," said his older sister, Dawn DeFord, who saw her brother for the last time at Christmas.

"He used to climb the Golden Gate Bridge in college. He would rock-climb without ropes. We had these radio towers behind our house growing up, big tall ones, he used to climb them at night. It was just Tod."

Surmon was celebrating the new year with friends just a day after winning at the Midlands Wrestling Championships in Chicago, a major national tournament that put him in contention for the U.S. Olympic team, Stanford head wrestling coach Chris Horpel told the San Jose Mercury News.

Horpel, who coached Surmon to his recent victory, went to a Chicago airport with him Friday morning, where Surmon caught a flight to Las Vegas and Horpel went to Los Angeles for the Rose Bowl.

"I said to him, 'People are going to be doing crazy things. Be careful,' and he looked at me and smiled and said, 'You know I won't,' " Horpel recalled Saturday.

"I don't know if Tod was simply someone who didn't feel fear the way some people do or if he just enjoyed the adrenaline rush that fear gave him," Horpel said.

Former teammate Beau Weiner called him fearless, yet said his risk-taking was always calculated.

"I've been with him doing all kinds of crazy stuff and I never once worried about him," he told the paper. "He would never do something stupid."

Surmon graduated from Stanford in 1996 with a degree in computer science and engineering and worked as a programmer at Aeris Communications in San Jose.

He had excelled at academics, Weiner said, but wrestling was his passion.

Horpel said Surmon was waiting for the company to go public, and then planned to devote more time to wrestling. Horpel said he had an "outside shot" of making the Olympic team this year, but his real goal was to compete in 2004.

At Stanford, he went to the NCAA championships three times, and in his senior year was rated first in the Pacific-10 Conference and fifth nationally in the 142-pound class. He was named All-American his senior year.

After graduating, Surmon returned to his alma mater as a volunteer assistant coach and wrestled competitively for the Dave Schultz Wrestling Club, coached by Horpel and named for the Stanford wrestling champion murdered four years ago by multimillionaire John E. du Pont.

Surmon helped coach Weiner, three years younger, to All-American honors at Stanford.

"He was always really energetic and positive and high-spirited," Weiner said. "That's one of the reasons why he was such a great coach. It rubbed off on everybody around him. He was the best coach I ever had."

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