Astrid Reichert – Chapter Two: The Early Years

Astrid Reichert was never a child who blended in. Born and raised in Austria, she was burly from the start — awkwardly big for her age, thick where other girls were slight. By the time she entered school, she was already a target. She didn’t move like the other girls, didn’t carry herself like the boys either. She was simply different, and children are merciless with difference.

Her father gave her tools to fight back, even if they weren’t the tools she needed most. A lifelong blue-collar worker, he believed in a simple philosophy: respect is earned, and heaven helps those who help themselves. For a girl getting bullied, those lessons were empowering. Astrid learned to plant her feet, throw harder, and hit back. But when it came to the loneliness of never fitting in — when the problem wasn’t bruises on her body but gnawing isolation in her mind — her father’s philosophy had nothing to offer.

Her mother saw trouble coming even earlier. A traditionally feminine woman, she insisted Astrid learn English to give her daughter a skill that might carry her beyond the factory floors. But she never approved of the fighting, and she saw the cruelty taking root long before her husband did. By the time Astrid was a preteen, stronger than anyone in the household, physical discipline was no longer possible. Scolding and pleading fell on deaf ears. The imbalance of power shifted early, and permanently.

If school made her an outsider, the mats made her a force. Astrid took to judo almost immediately, her size and strength making her formidable. By the age of twelve, she was already a regional youth champion. There was talk in some circles about Olympic potential. At the same time, a new discipline was starting to creep into Europe’s martial arts gyms — “jujitsu,” as it was often called then, a grappling art that emphasized submissions. Where judo ended with the throw, jujitsu carried the fight further. The idea of choking and twisting until an opponent begged for release fascinated Astrid. By her teens, she was splitting her time: half in judo halls, half in improvised jujitsu clubs where pioneers of the art taught what they had pieced together from abroad.

By her mid-teens, Astrid wasn’t just training at home. Through her coaches, she attended multi-discipline combat camps in Germany, where judoka, amateur wrestlers, and Sambo practitioners all shared the mats. Astrid dabbled in both wrestling and Sambo there. She didn’t become fluent in either style, but she absorbed enough to give her an edge: the off-angle takedowns, the taste for leglocks, the sense of control that came from grinding rides. She also realized she had unusual upper-body strength for a women’s competitor, and began focusing on learning how to grind from the top. Even though judo and jujitsu emphasized technique over strength, Astrid was learning to use brute force as a lever — muscling her way into positions, then using technique to finish once opponents were already smothered.

She grew not just in skill, but in calculation. Astrid developed an uncanny sense for exactly how far she could go without consequences. She learned which coaches would stop her if she held a choke too long, and which would look the other way. She recognized who admired her “killer instinct,” and who quietly approved of her cruelty. To some she was a problem. To others, she was promise. Astrid mapped the boundaries of each room she entered and lived right up against them, daring anyone to push her back.

By her mid-teens, her body was changing too. The burly, awkward girl who had been mocked for looking “wrong” began to fill out. The muscle she had carried since childhood didn’t go away, but curves layered over it. She was still short, still stocky, but she was no longer homely. For the first time, people began to call her pretty.

Astrid wasn’t sure what to do with that at first. She wasn’t even certain she liked boys, at least not in the way her classmates did, but she discovered quickly that she loved their attention. And she had a sixth sense for it — the same instinct she used to push coaches and opponents to the edge of their limits worked just as well in social settings. She could tell which smiles meant infatuation, which glances meant weakness. She wasn’t above using that to stir trouble.

The attention emboldened her. Inspired by some of the coaches and veteran fighters she met at camps, Astrid began experimenting with tattoos, testing how far she could push her image beyond the “good Austrian daughter” her mother had once hoped for. Her father, delighted that his daughter was excelling in combat sports, stayed blind to the darker edges of her behavior. Her mother, by then, was too afraid of her to protest. With no restraints left at home, Astrid branched out into alternative fashion, hair dyes, and looks that blurred the line between fighter, model, and provocateur.

By the time she turned twenty-one, Astrid was no longer just a competitor. She was a hybrid identity — part fitness model, part fighter, part alt-girl influencer before the label even existed. On the mats, she was still cruel and calculating. But outside the gym, she was discovering how to project that same dangerous allure into photos, into parties, into every room she walked into.

At sixteen, she had already joined her first MMA club, training in secret while she waited to become old enough to compete. For two years she battered sparring partners in gyms, sharpening her tools, learning how to blend her judo, jujitsu, Sambo, and wrestling into something more complete. By the time her eighteenth birthday came, Astrid Reichert wasn’t debuting as a beginner. She was unveiling a monster.