GrandOlm

Two wrestler stand out to me. Ivan Yarygin. It's not just the name of a tournament. A great siberian wrestler, extremely strong, and built like a greek god. Pinned everyone at runs at the Europeans, Worlds, and Olympics. He doesn't have the medal haul of other wrestlers, but he was so special. The other one is Tomov. Best wrestler to never win an Olympic Gold. Three times silver medalist and was number one in the world for 15 years. He was so talented that he beat a giant like Rostorotsky, after a 5 year lay off at his first tourney back. Choked terribly at the Olympics each time. If it wasn't for politics, I think he would have finally won at the 84 games.

MMA, like boxing, is run as prizefighting and not purely a sport. Very different from the tennises, badmitons, judos, or amateur wrestlings of the world. There are perks to it (money), but also massive downsides and distractions like woven into the fabric corruption, the showmanship and show business aspects. It's a different mindset and skillset to thrive in something that's in some ways a giant popularity contest masquerading as a sport. In sportive systems, all you have to worry about is your athletic performance (at least in most individual sports, team sports have interpersonal politics with team selection). In prize fighting, you have to worry about how boring your style is perceived as and how many ppvs you sell.

No. My best guess is that you're saying some WWE performers will try to make the Olympics in wrestling. But that is both implausible and out of left field.

What do you mean by that?

A lot of refs are middle aged, most adults have sedentary lives, and most importantly calorie rich food is abundant easy to obtain. But this is true of the general public and not just wrestling refs.

I don't know about love, but isn't his main contention that wrestling has a low fame/money generating ceiling? I think he is mostly right about that (if delusional about his own abilities), but I do wonder just how rich and famous an American version of Karelin could get in the 2020s-30s.

I am seeing that Mirzazadeh was born in 98 which would make him 30 for the next Olympics. Yeah super heavyweights are a different in that the ones with conservative styles are in there primes from like 26 to 35 (and some can win gold even up to their early 40s) and the ones with explosive games (throws, lifts) from about 25 to 32. So I'd say he has one more Olympics left (maybe 2) in his prime. I'm not impressed with Hamza. I think he's just a big body that is hard to score on. Kind of like Acosta. At 23 years old, great wrestlers don't get pinned by an outside reach bronze medalist. He'll medal a lot, especially in Europe, because someone has to and he's young. Semenov already looks like a 48 year old truck driver living on a fast food diet, I don't think he'll age gracefully. Joking aside, he's already struggled with weight, motivation, and fitness in his 20s, I doubt he will experience a renaissance in his 30s. He also has the most lift and throw based game of any of the top super heavies (which is why he's my favorite active wrestler). Those people tend to have shorter careers (ala Karelin) as it requires enormous strength exertion and is liable to be injurious . My prediction is he won't be winning golds at 34.

He is elderly in middle weight years. The only wrestling demographic that performs well from their mid 30s to early 40s are greco roman super heavyweights.

I think Mirzazadeh is the best in the world and he probably deserves to be an Olympic Gold medalist at the next games. But he is not a young wrestler anymore, so he needs to take his chances. His conservative, low scoring style may come back to haunt him at some critical junction. Yousefi's unique cardio them to death approach works at 130 because there are so many poorly conditioned wrestlers at 130 kg. It doesn't fly against Mirzazadeh and it wouldn't work against an international dominant big man (there are none around right now). He needs to solve Mirzazadeh or is his entire career is going to pass him by. Hedayati I think has the most technical dimensions to his wrestling. He is young and has good wins at small events against the best from the rest of the world like Riza or Oscar. Looks not athletic, body composition appears spongy/high body fat, almost like a college sumo wrestler. The best wrestlers at Greco have been supremely athletic and sculpted big men like Karelin, Tomov, and Lopez, so I don't think he'll be the next destroyer. Then again if Cuba's program folds from financial pressure and Russia continues declining in Greco, where exactly is the next person going to come from to stop him (besides Iran)?

Both styles are unpopular. Freestyle is only popular in Iran and marginally popular (I'm counting Folk Style as Freestyle) in the USA. It's not even popular in Russia, Russia has two small and fairly poor regions that heavily practice FS. Most Russians have nothing to do with freestyle wresting. So Greco and Freestyle are either both tied in how irrelevant they are in most countries (like Japan) or Greco is slightly to noticeably more popular in a given nation (especially in Europe). Not sugar coating Greco's situation, they would probably swap places with FS. But that's really mainly because of America's Folk style machine, not what freestyle is doing overseas. The European Championships were the Dagestan and Ossetian Open in disguise, that's not a healthy sport. Greco is in the olympics because wrestling was in the ancient olympics. It's also possible that leg grabs were not allowed in ancient Greco Roman wrestling, which would make modern Greco the closest homage to the ancients.

Albania is a non wrestling nation. Better than Bahrain but not good at all. A lot of these non wrestling nation programs are mostly comprised of 1st or 2nd generation immigrants, even putting the high level world teamer transfers aside. Like I saw a short documentary about the UK program and it was a lot of low level wrestling wise Iranian 1st/2nd gen immigrants (complaining about not getting funding to go to big events, so that they can get teched in round 1 by another no hoper). I don't buy the benefit argument since a lot of these wrestlers don't even live in these countries. I mean Bulgaria is a test case, transfers aside, are they anywhere close to what they were in the communist era.... No not even close. And even when they do live there, they start forming cliques and bringing more people in from abroad. Imagine if Penn State, Iowa, and Oklahoma St. had Russian coaches, a lot of Russian transfers, were instructing in Russian, and had most of the NIL money. Do you think that would be good for US wrestling? A lot of the local Bulgarian World Class champions from 80s, 70s, maybe the 60s are still around. They don't like what they are seeing and they helped kick up a fuss about the "new normal" state of affairs. This whole pushback probably wouldn't have happened without them.

I don't think the faction that won this recent power struggle care that much about winning medals (at least in the short term). I think they were about taking back control of their wrestling federation at all costs. I'm not actually sure that they will go through with banning the wrestlers they already have. This might just be bluster or even misinformation. I do hope they at least ban future transfers.

Bahrain has 0 wrestling culture. So Taz isn't really stealing opportunities from anyone, he's just artificially propping up Bahrain's sporting prowess on the global stage. I think the bigger issue and what UWW is worried about is the Tier 2 nations getting replaced by transfers and it has gotten pretty bad in Freestyle ( nations like Hungary, Poland, Azerbaijan, Germany (greco), Bulgaria, Romania (greco), Ukraine, Belarus). It's that transfers simultaneity artificially inflate the health of wrestling in these nations while probably harming the grass roots wrestling scene. I think wrestlers follow money or networking. If they have networking and can make money in a country, they will go there (and those networks appear to be growing larger and larger). Maybe Taz was directly approached by a wealthy patron from Bahrain.

Bulgaria are the ogs of mercenary wrestling. They were using transfers all the way back in the 90s, before it was cool. Soviet developed Nazaryan, Mureiko, were winning medals for them way back. I think it was the wrong way of trying to save a dying wrestling power and the consequences of those choices are still with them today. The rising tide did not lift all, ethnic Bulgarians are not winning medals like in the days of their fathers and grandfathers. I could imagine the frustration of the local Bulgarians. Foreign coaches, training foreign athletes, and everyone else left out in the cold with a vague promise that it will trickle down eventually. And then for all these years of trainers and high level athletes brought in; thirty years of this process culminates in two foreigners and no ethnic Bulgarians winning golds at the most recent olympics.

Maybe you were referring to other wrestlers (I think Bulgaria does have at least two or more caucasian wrestlers), but the other half of the famous duo, Novikov, is slavic not caucasian. He is a relatively rare ukranian transfer. Bulgaria probably has a stronger local wrestling culture (due to their past as the crown princes of greco and sold freestylers) that can throw its weight around and stick up for itself more than other transfer havens like Poland, Serbia, or Azerbaijan. So this might be a one off. But 75% of Euro freestyle gold and silver medalists being Russians in disguise, well that's not what wrestling's leadership wants.