Iran wrestling news

[Truzzcat]

1 hour ago, shiraz321 said:

Japan sends the trial runner up to asians, you will see they have a totally different team between worlds and asians. They do the same for juniors also. I think it's a good way to let more guys get international experience. Russia also sends their trials runner up to euros. USA is wrestling pan ams which is a terrible continent for wrestling. 

Pan am's at the age level has largely turned into US vs other US guys that are representing Brazil or PR so often times they are matches that have occurred multiple times already in folkstyle.

[shiraz321]

6 hours ago, Undefeated said:

I think the way Americans train in folkstyle gives them an edge that carries over into freestyle. Folkstyle just has way more constant engagement - there’s way less downtime where you can just stand around and wait or handfight endlessly. So they grow up learning to wrestle non-stop, and that kind of pace wears our guys out.

Also, this whole “one coach makes all the calls for every weight” approach is outdated - especially at the senior level. They’re spending millions, so clearly there’s money. Why not bring in specialized coaches for each weight?

I don't think folk gives them an edge. I think, like us, they just have a lot of wrestlers and going off olympic medal counts they also produce the best athletes in the world. I mean we are talking about USA but they flopped in the Olympics also for mens freestyle. We flopped too with that ridiculous 3 silvers but not as bad as them. 

 

I think Iran's main problem is winning olympic freestyle golds. We have 3 olympic champs since 2000. 1 of those was due to half his weight class failing the drug test. We are now  at back to back olympics with no freestyle gold. That is really, really bad for a country that considers itself a major wrestling country. I don't like Dorostkar either. Guy randomly resigns a year prior to the Olympics then randomly comes back the year after. But it's not all his fault. 

 

As for the coaches, we have weight class coaches, Taghavi is is the coach for the lighter weights for example but yes they work under the federation and head coach. Difference is in the USA they mostly train at their own wrestling clubs with their own coaches for the majority of their preparation whereas in Iran they all train at the national camp almost year round. You can't take that system and put it in Iran because while the national camp is certainly an impressive facility, we only have one of those. They have comparable facilities throughout the country. 

 As for wearing guys out, not all their guys are like that. We  currently have and have in the past had guys like that too. Zare wears guys out. Firouzpour wears guys out and will likely be a world champ this year  even though he has a terrible style of wrestling. In contrast their 86 this year struggles to wrestle 6 minutes. I think that is more to do with the individual athlete.

[shiraz321]

6 hours ago, Truzzcat said:

Pan am's at the age level has largely turned into US vs other US guys that are representing Brazil or PR so often times they are matches that have occurred multiple times already in folkstyle.

Yes, it's a shame Cuba's freestyle program is completely dead. They sent a 40 year old Garzan to the olympics last year. They must have cut what little funding they had to it. 

[Lucho]

1 hour ago, shiraz321 said:

I don't think folk gives them an edge. I think, like us, they just have a lot of wrestlers and going off olympic medal counts they also produce the best athletes in the world. I mean we are talking about USA but they flopped in the Olympics also for mens freestyle. We flopped too with that ridiculous 3 silvers but not as bad as them. 

 

I think Iran's main problem is winning olympic freestyle golds. We have 3 olympic champs since 2000. 1 of those was due to half his weight class failing the drug test. We are now  at back to back olympics with no freestyle gold. That is really, really bad for a country that considers itself a major wrestling country. I don't like Dorostkar either. Guy randomly resigns a year prior to the Olympics then randomly comes back the year after. But it's not all his fault. 

 

As for the coaches, we have weight class coaches, Taghavi is is the coach for the lighter weights for example but yes they work under the federation and head coach. Difference is in the USA they mostly train at their own wrestling clubs with their own coaches for the majority of their preparation whereas in Iran they all train at the national camp almost year round. You can't take that system and put it in Iran because while the national camp is certainly an impressive facility, we only have one of those. They have comparable facilities throughout the country. 

 As for wearing guys out, not all their guys are like that. We  currently have and have in the past had guys like that too. Zare wears guys out. Firouzpour wears guys out and will likely be a world champ this year  even though he has a terrible style of wrestling. In contrast their 86 this year struggles to wrestle 6 minutes. I think that is more to do with the individual athlete.

I wish they didn't have Dorostkar as the head coach. Why can't Dabir just let his ego go and pick Reza Yazdani as the head coach of the national team? Our biggest problem in freestyle is the stubbornness of the top brass as opposed to investment and talent. If Reza Yazdani was the head coach of this team I am very confident we would have won at least 2 of the finals in Paris last year. Dorostkar isn't qualified to be the head coach of Iran's junior guys let alone our senior team. 

[Lucho]

1 hour ago, shiraz321 said:

Yes, it's a shame Cuba's freestyle program is completely dead. They sent a 40 year old Garzan to the olympics last year. They must have cut what little funding they had to it. 

I think they will also struggle to field a competitive greco team too in the near future unfortunately. Without Mijain Lopez their team is very weak tbh. I don't think Rosillo, Pino or Orta are going to be world championship contenders anymore in their respective weight classes and they don't have any promising new crop coming in either.

[Undefeated]

1 hour ago, shiraz321 said:

I don't think folk gives them an edge. I think, like us, they just have a lot of wrestlers and going off olympic medal counts they also produce the best athletes in the world. I mean we are talking about USA but they flopped in the Olympics also for mens freestyle. We flopped too with that ridiculous 3 silvers but not as bad as them. 

 

I think Iran's main problem is winning olympic freestyle golds. We have 3 olympic champs since 2000. 1 of those was due to half his weight class failing the drug test. We are now  at back to back olympics with no freestyle gold. That is really, really bad for a country that considers itself a major wrestling country. I don't like Dorostkar either. Guy randomly resigns a year prior to the Olympics then randomly comes back the year after. But it's not all his fault. 

 

As for the coaches, we have weight class coaches, Taghavi is is the coach for the lighter weights for example but yes they work under the federation and head coach. Difference is in the USA they mostly train at their own wrestling clubs with their own coaches for the majority of their preparation whereas in Iran they all train at the national camp almost year round. You can't take that system and put it in Iran because while the national camp is certainly an impressive facility, we only have one of those. They have comparable facilities throughout the country. 

 As for wearing guys out, not all their guys are like that. We  currently have and have in the past had guys like that too. Zare wears guys out. Firouzpour wears guys out and will likely be a world champ this year  even though he has a terrible style of wrestling. In contrast their 86 this year struggles to wrestle 6 minutes. I think that is more to do with the individual athlete.

 

I don’t think Taghavi really acts as a weight class coach for the lightweights in the national team. You can kinda tell from what Ehsan Lashgari said after leaving the coaching staff - he said not only were they completely left out of the decision-making process, but they weren’t even informed about the head coach’s plans, let alone being consulted. Sure, Lashgari was brought in by Kaveh, but I don’t see any difference between Kaveh and Dorostkar in that regard.

A real weight class coach should analyze the main rivals and focus entirely on them and his own guy. Taghavi, to me, seems more like a training coach than a tactical one.

That said, I do agree with a lot of your points overall.

Actually, just today I was thinking - it might not be a bad idea for the federation to start a college-style league in Iran and organize dual meets between Iran and the U.S. Like, have Tehran’s team wrestle a team from one of the U.S. states. They could invite American college teams to come to Iran. It’d be exciting for fans, and it might have some positive side effects beyond wrestling too...

[shiraz321]

Well we had a lot of different coaches over the years. Rasoul Khadem couldn't produce many golds either. 2012 - 1 ( ghasemi due to Taymazov and the Georgian failing the drug test) 2013 - 2 ( rahimi and yazdani) - 2014 0 golds - 2015 - 0 golds - 2016 rio - 1 gold ( yazdani) - 2017 - 1 gold and only 1 medal total ( yazdani) 2018 - 0. I know he wasn't technically the head coach in 2017 as it was Talai but he was obviously still pulling the strings and Talaei was a highly accomplished wrestler also. 

[Truzzcat]

4 hours ago, shiraz321 said:

Yes, it's a shame Cuba's freestyle program is completely dead. They sent a 40 year old Garzan to the olympics last year. They must have cut what little funding they had to it. 

what really sucks about that is I think Cubans have some of the best genetics in the world. Their ability to compete in combat sports at a high level well into their late 30's and 40's is incredible to me. There was a rumor that reineri andreau was trying to get Us citizenship to try and compete at 57kg which would be interesting hes tough.

[Window12]

With regards to Olympic golds in freestyle they are just very hard to get with only 6 anva every 4 years and small margins make big difference.Iran was in the running for 86 kg but the shoulder issue came up. For 125 Geno came up with very aggressive tactics and Zare was not that type of wrestler to mirror that type of westling ( think back to the prior year where Geno actually slapped him in the final) and at 65 Amouzad got caught in the leg lace of dome( here questions are being asked of the technical committee why Iranians keep getting caught against Japan in this way).

on the positive side the elite Iranian wrestlers are usually have long careers and medal regularly. For example the often overlooked Nokhodi at 18 won an Asian senior bronze medal and at 24 has 2 world silver and 2 world bronze to add to that.  Not many 24 year olds in the USA or Japan can boast his accomplishments and he does not get much headlines.
This is set against competition that includes Russia and the Russian exports( Including Taz, Ramazanov, Valiev Salakzanov, Tsabalov etc) Japan( in the lower weight) USA and the rest of the world.

looks like to me we expect the freestyle team to get multiple gold medals in the Olympics and with every single wrestler wrestling like Saitiev and demolishing their opponents with technical falls in spectacular fashion.This seems very unrealistic .If Firouzpour wins the gold medal at 92 kg in freestyle wrestling in  the style of current Iranian wrestling keeping a disciplined stance with underhooks and high forward pressure then that’s still a very high achievement given the level of the competition that is around and I will take that for sure.

[shiraz321]

0 golds LOL. You got Dabir saying any wrestling tournament Iran enters we should win half the golds. Very bad! 

[GrandOlm]

18 hours ago, Undefeated said:

I think the way Americans train in folkstyle gives them an edge that carries over into freestyle. Folkstyle just has way more constant engagement - there’s way less downtime where you can just stand around and wait or handfight endlessly. So they grow up learning to wrestle non-stop, and that kind of pace wears our guys out.

Also, this whole “one coach makes all the calls for every weight” approach is outdated - especially at the senior level. They’re spending millions, so clearly there’s money. Why not bring in specialized coaches for each weight?

Given the amount of participants, money, quality youth clubs training kids from very young ages, and wrestling infrastructure that the US has compared the rest of the world, you'd expect Americans to dominate wrestling the way China does in ping pong. 

But they don't. Somehow a plucky little tag team of Dagestan+Ossetia and Mazandaran are able to match them. I think it's thanks to Folk style that we have the current rough parity at the top.

There is this misconception that wrestling outside of America works the same way as in America, just on mini scale. In a lot of what would be considered the Tier 2 nations, the entire wrestling scene is a club or two in the capital plus one other big city and maybe one military run program. That's it. 

[Undefeated]

2 hours ago, GrandOlm said:

Given the amount of participants, money, quality youth clubs training kids from very young ages, and wrestling infrastructure that the US has compared the rest of the world, you'd expect Americans to dominate wrestling the way China does in ping pong.

Given the amount of participants and everything you just mentioned, what really surprises me is how little support American wrestlers seem to get from their own fans online. I remember UWW’s Instagram once posted about Sarah Hildebrandt - only ten people commented, and eight of them were Iranians!

[GrandOlm]

1 hour ago, Undefeated said:

Given the amount of participants and everything you just mentioned, what really surprises me is how little support American wrestlers seem to get from their own fans online. I remember UWW’s Instagram once posted about Sarah Hildebrandt - only ten people commented, and eight of them were Iranians!

Well, wrestling is mostly a parent-participant sport in the US. If interest goes any further than that, it ends at rooting for the college alma mater.

Funny you mention Iranians, they're one of the few (or the only???) countries in the world with mass appeal fandom for wrestling. Like if there's a lively crowd at Worlds, 90%+ of the time it's Iranians in the stands. 

Everywhere else the wrestling world is a small and insular community. You might be the local town hero, but the  regular denizens of St Petersburg or Tokyo have never wrestled and don't follow the sport at all. If you win an Olympic medal, you might participate in a ceremony and get a picture with a politician. That's about the extent of your national appeal. 

Edited 18 minutes ago by GrandOlm