2024 Olympic Preview: 97 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 goes back around to men's freestyle at 97 kg. Our representative at 97 kg is the same wrestler whose represented us at this weight at every World/Olympic event since 2015, Kyle Snyder. Snyder will seek his third Olympic medal and his second of the gold variety. All of the sudden, Snyder is the most experienced member of our men's freestyle team and one of only two holdovers from the 2020(1) Olympic Team. 

We'll talk more below about who Snyder has to go through to add more hardware to his collection. 

97kg entries

Magomedkhan Magomedov (Azerbaijan)
Akhmed Tazhudinov (Bahrain)
Awusayiman Habila (China)

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