GrandOlm

Not sure why everyone ignores Medved (who also died not that long ago). He has one more world medal than Saitiev despite the disadvantage of being the bygone era wrestler and he went undefeated in the last 7 years of his career.

I think Japanese wrestlers value Worlds less than most top nations. I think this has been the case for a long time and why they are underrepresented in world medal counts for their best wrestlers.

He competes a lot. I don't hold losses against wrestlers unless it's an important tournament. Worlds last year proved that 86 isn't " super deep" like all its defenders insisted. Yazdani and Taylor are not meta humans who could tech everyone in the world but themselves.

Kyle's main similarities to Bruce are that he medals a lot, while losing a lot, and is untouchable domestically. But I think their standing at their respective weight and the trajectories differ. Bruce was ambiguously the best wrestler in the world for most of his career, with a 4 year window in his 30s where he had a mini reign as the clear top guy. Snyder peaked early and had his mini reign very young. He was then overshadowed by another wrestler moving up and seemed to regress as he moved into his later 20s.

I didn't think anything of it. Before I even saw his response, I was almost certain that he'd pick Spencer. I think it's just the culture of senior level wrestlers in the US. If you're American, you back the American publicly. It's still not that rare for senior level wrestlers to call their opponents "the Russian" or "the Turk". Not exactly a mindset that lends itself to heaping praise on foreign opponents.

My read on Spencer is that if he continues with Freestyle in the long run and stays mostly healthy, he'll be in that Bruce Baumgartner tier: Possibly the best all around wrestler at his weight but with no seperation and has losses in him against the other medalists. I think the Zhou matches prove already that he's not going to destroy the field. So I don't really think that close win/loss to Ono would reveal much of anything.

Some of it is just blatant buying, but a lot of it is athlete driven I think. They will immigrate and try out for a team. If your options are might never get a chance in Dagestan or go to a middling wrestling nation (like a Poland or Hungary) where you can wrestle in all the big tournaments and win medals, it's not hard to understand why they do it. Some of these mediocre wrestling countries are fairly generous about rewarding athletes who contribute to their total olympic medal counts. That this attracts foreign wrestlers is an unintended consequence and not something these nations were thinking about when making these structures. Now, I think these foreign wrestlers do absolutely nothing for the transfer nation's growth in wrestling, but I'm not convinced that they're super detrimental. Maybe if they chain migrate a lot of their friends from home and completely shut out native wrestlers, but has that happened yet? Freestyle is a bad investment if you're trying to up your Olympic medal anyways. Greco is much less optimized and the far better choice if you want to go the wrestling route.

I kind of have the same feeling. I think Zare might be just the wrong combination of still too slow to counteract his offense, without any of the advantages of a bigger body. Masoumi's long octopus arms might actually help against someone like Gable. If he really is only 20 he should still have the potential to jump levels and I don't think the best hw at FS has ever been an under 20 year old (unless I'm forgetting someone).

Semenov got gold at Euros in 2024, he came in way out of shape, overweight , and still won. I was thinking there are like 3 men in Iran who could have beaten him that tournament .... Europe can't even produce one person anymore at that level? Mirzazadeh, Yousefi, and Hedayati are fine wrestlers, but they're not some once in a generation anomalies. Or how did someone like Alin win gold at Euros? Alin almost lost to an unremarkable American wrestler who was a beginner at Greco. The European championships used to be almost as strong as the world championships and now? Bulgaria if you take away the transfers, is about the same level as America (not good). Their home grown flagship was Milov and he was lower level than Hancock.

I don't think that's a coincidence. I think Greco has been begging for some country to take advantage of the weak international scene since the fall of the eastern bloc (and now Cuba with their financial problems). Iran also has the 97 kg champion and the 67 kg champ? I've said it so many times but there is no Greco version of Dagestan, Ossetia, American folk system or Mazandaran. So any country that trains kids from a decently young age, well, and does it to a wide enough talent pool, should dominate. Russia has been coasting on fumes for over 30 year, and it looks like Iran is kind of stepping up slowly.

Sometimes people are just bad matchups. Zare and Taha always wrestled each other close and while Taha and Gwiz could have decently competitive matches, Zare always absolutely destroyed Gwiz.

Freestyle is popular in certain Caucus countries/regions. Greco is somewhat popular in Hungary. Greco also has marginal followings in Scandinavia, Estonia, Germany, Georgia, and Russia. That's about it. I don't think any European country comes anywhere close to the US in terms of wrestling popularity. Maybe Iran does. No one in Europe though.

Yousefi is facing Semonov tomorrow. I wonder how it goes. i could easily see Semenov coming in fat and way out of shape and Yousefi just pushing and cardioing him to death. But then again Yousefi has taken some bad losses himself. If Semenov does lose, that means Iran has maybe the three best Super heavyweights in the world and they are all keeping each other off medal winning runs.

Truer representation of the "world level" than the American, Dagestan, and Ossetian transfer artificially boosted version.

Sumo is most analogous to baseball in America, a national past time with an aging fan base and decreasing youth interest. Like baseball, a lot of grey heads at games and events. It also has religious-cultural aspects not found in any American or European sports (maybe bullfighting aside, though they call themselves an art not sport). It's also being dominated by Mongolians. This new yokozuna is the nephew of another mongolian yokozuna who along with a fellow mongolian dominated the sport in the 00s and 10s. The last ethnic Japanese super champion, Takanohana, was reigning all the way back in the 90s. So you'd have to be well into your 40s to remember a great Japanese champion. I think until Japan produces another Takanohana, Chiyonofuji, Kitnoumi, or Taiho like wrestler, the sport will continue losing popularity (maybe long term even a great champion wont save it from deeper rooted trends).