Michael

What happened to these traditional freestyle wrestling powers? As recently as 2023, Turkey/Türkiye was definitively a top-10 nation in men's freestyle, and now in 2025 they have one wrestler in 10th place (Soner Demirtaş) and nobody else earning team points. Cuba's program seems to have started falling off a few years earlier (I think after a few perennial top guys like Yowlys Bonne and Reineris Salas retired), and similar to Turkey they've now got only one wrestler earning team points (Arturo Silot, 10th place). For Turkey, at least, I don't think it's as simple as losing Akgül. The last World Championship where Turkey didn't have at least two medalists was 2011. The last World Championship where they weren't top 10 was 2010. What's the deal? Did these countries lose their top coaches? Did they decide to just go all-in on Greco-Roman?

Sadulaev won the Rio Olympics at age 20. He already had two senior world championships at that point.

LJ Araujo. 5-time ND state champ, now wrestling for Nebraska.

Hidlay and Marsteller at 86 kgs as well. Winner will have to wrestle a fresh Zahid Valencia.

I thought it was usually decided by the Russian national championship, but I noticed that Sadulaev apparently hasn't wrestled in one since 2020. Does their coach look for candidates at the national championship and then do private wrestle-offs between the current guy and the potential new guy or what?