2024 Olympic Preview: 74 kg Men's Freestyle

It’s late July which means the 2024 Olympic Games are right around the corner. Over the next two weeks, InterMat will bring you individual weight class previews for each of the 18 weights contested at the Olympic Games. 

The 2024 version has already been slightly different from years past. Earlier in the summer, United World Wrestling announced a list of wrestlers from Belarus and Russia who would not be permitted to compete due to their support of the war with Ukraine. After this decision, Russia decided to withdraw all of its entries for wrestling. That led to replacements being named earlier this month. 

With all of the moving parts, and a field that wasn’t confirmed until later in the game, previewing the action had to take a back seat since we weren’t sure who would actually be in Paris. 

UWW has recently published entry lists for each of the three styles, so we are good to go. 

Our next weight class preview comes back to men’s freestyle at 74 kg. 

This weight class probably has the best path to a gold medal from any of our men’s freestyle competitors. Kyle Dake comes in as the top seed and has earned a medal at every world/Olympic level event he’s entered since 2018 - four of them being gold medals. Even though Dake’s the favorite at this weight, there are still plenty of competitors who could trip him up if he’s not on his game. 

74kg entries

Chermen Valiev (ALB)

Turan Bayramov (AZE)

Feng Lu (CHN)

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