Foley's Friday Mailbag: May 24, 2013

The United 4 Wrestling event in LA attracted 3,500 fans (Photo/Tony Rotundo, WrestlersAreWarriors.com)

Saori Yoshida

The inaugural international Olympic Games held in Athens in 1896 included a small wrestling meet, commonly and incorrectly referred to in history books as Greco Roman style -- which is absolutely wrong.

The style of wrestling at these Games was actually arranged in a dirt pit at one end of the Panathenaic Stadium under local Greek rules, called Palema, which had effectively been trialled at the predecessor events of the IOC Olympics, or the Zappas Olympic Games. Not surprisingly, leg takedowns were permitted in these competitions. The Zappas Olympics were held in Athens in 1859, 1870 and 1875 and there is even a thorough sporting record kept of champions at these events. The next IOC Olympics were held in Paris in 1900 as part of the Exposition Universelle and were such a debacle that they did not even include a wrestling meet. Apparently no amateur wrestlers could be found because one of the highlights of the Exposition was the Professional Greco Roman World Championship, which was being held at the same time. The 1904 Olympic Games were then moved across the Atlantic to the USA city of St. Louis as part of the World's Fair and just as in Athens the wrestling was conducted under the rules of the most popular local style, Catch as Catch Can wrestling. The European's were offended because nearly all the wrestling medals were won by Americans.

The following year the "Deutsche Athleten-Verband" was formed in Duisburg, in true German fashion they took command of all amateur Greco-Roman wrestling and weightlifting competitions in continental Europe. The DAV conducted an amateur Greco Roman World Championships from 1904 till 1913 but after WW1 the IAWF (now FILA) took over the event.

The 1906 Intercalated Olympics returned to Athens and despite protests against it, the wrestling was once again held under the now extinct Greek Palema rules (freestlye). At the 1908 London Olympics an attempt was made to run concurrent competitions in both Greco Roman and Catch as Catch Can at the White City Stadium but this didn't stop the growing sense of rivalry between the popular styles.

By the time of the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, only Greco-Roman wrestling competitions were permitted to be held and in a further sub to the organizers of Catch as Catch Can, demonstrations of the Icelandic folk wrestling style called Glima were also conducted. The following year there were plans to create an international body just for wrestling but this was put on hold as it had instead morphed into the "Internationaler Verband fur Schwerathletik" that included not just Greco-Roman wrestling but also Weight Lifting, Boxing and Tug of War, once again with the exclusion of the Anglophone Catch as Catch Can style.

The Great War prevented an Olympics in 1916 and stifled any further developments but at the first post war 1920 Antwerp Games & IOC Conference it was decided that each sport should have its own international body and that the International Amateur Wrestling Federation (FILA) should conduct tournaments in the two popular international styles, Greco Roman and Catch as Catch Can, the latter having its rules modified and name changed to Freestyle to apparently make it more appealing as a global sport, or at least not offend the Europeans anymore. All of the submission finishes that gave Catch as Catch Can its unique character were forbidden and the 3-second supine pinfall was replaced by a supine touch fall the same as in Greco Roman.

Outside of the control of FILA in the USA, Catch as Catch Can wrestling further evolved into two separate offshoots, the performance art called professional wrestling and the competitive scholastic sport of collegiate folkstyle wrestling.