GrandOlm

Hasn't that all turned out to be noise and meaningless grandstanding? The flo people seem very sure that the 86 kg transfer will continue competing. Bulgaria have been like this for 30 years, it's not going to be easy to change. Bulgaria is also an extreme case of going from the second best greco nation in the world, to a complete paper tiger that only stays afloat by buying wrestlers from foreign countries. I don't think Armenia has that freestyle wrestling tradition. They didn't even send anyone to 125kg at 2023 worlds.

Azerbaijan are one the biggest mercenary teams around. I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up there.

It does border China, so....? The stan countries you listed range from ok to bad and one is primarily Greco. It's hard enough to get Japanese wrestlers to compete at worlds, let alone a ranking series. I would't say so. It's quite a bit farther east or just not close to the wrestling hotbeds. I guess the point was more for American wrestlers, since Mongolia is annoyingly far away with no real draw to it. I think it's understandable why most wrestlers skipped this one.

Do you blame them? Who wants fly all the way to Mongolia for a tournament no one will remember. There are like no good wrestling areas near Mongolia. And Mongolia is a Tier 2 or 3 wrestling nation itself. And for what, ranking points? They don't even matter since many of the best wrestlers go unseeded for Worlds and the Olympics.

He is a talented public speaker.

There is a decent amount of footage of him. Below is a match he had with Bruce. I think he had a strong case for being the best Freestyle wrestler to never win an Olympic Gold medal. We've lost a lot of great wrestlers recently. I think Medved and Saitiev both died within the past two years. Ivanitsky died not that long ago.

I dislike that term, all it means usually in common speak is the best current/very recently retired player (people like Christian Pyles revel in being prisoner of the moment hype mongers and will angrily dismiss anyone from older generations). People try to conflate it with most decorated. Even when the modern athlete is objectively not the most decorated, some like Pyles will still just lie about that or proudly spout wrong information. If you corner the Pyles of the world, they love the strategy of saying current athletes are objectively higher level so the facts, details don't matter (by that logic, nothing he is hyping now matters since 50 years from now today's athletes will be inferior to the future ones, but funny enough he doesn't take that stand). So the "GOAT" is Yazdani. And in 15 years it will be someone else. The closest thing to Gable might be Takhti. He was one of the (or the first?) Iranian Olympic gold medalists. He transcended just wrestling by becoming something of a political figure, revered as an ideal of a courteous-chivalrous wrestler. He had a famous exhibition match against Medved. I think the cultural impact is most Gable esque. Of course Takhti had silverware to back it up, but that's how I associate it more. If it's just most decorated, Movahed is a six time world level medalist, with 2 asian games, and won the Olympics. He's objectively number one in that regard, pretty clearly imo. But Gable is not America's most decorated wrestler, so I wouldn't think of Movahed as an Iranian Gable.

The only nations or regions that can churn out elite wrestlers across the weight spectrum (light, middle heavy) are the US, Mazandaran, and Dagestan/Ossetia. So everyone else has a problem, somewhere (or everywhere). I think Arsan Fadzaev was an example of a dominant wrestler from this weight range historically. It's probably still true that average man in high level wrestling regions, when in shape, is somewhere around 70ish kg. This lends itself to 65 kg for competition purposes.

He's very old for a wrestler, especially at his weight class. Maybe he's just quietly retiring and doesn't want a big sob tour. It's going to come up naturally when he's 45 and gets inducted into whatever society after not competing for a long time, then you can have all the retrospectives and congratulations. Plus maybe a small part of him is still itching to try for 2028, even if realistically he feels he can't do it and in the present day isn't training for making a world team. But he doesn't want to be that guy who retires 4 times (Gable, jk).

Bruce was born in 1960. He won his first full strength, major tournament at a month shy of 26 (1986 worlds). He did win the Olympics at age 23, but that was a boycott year and more like the pan ams. He wasn't good enough to win with a full field in the first half of his 20s. I'd say Bruce's prime was at the ages of 31-35. That's when he had his best career results.

Bruce's 84 Olympic Gold is not a world level medal. I don't think it merits being mentioned over even his performances in forgotten tournaments. I guess you could try to say that about 1980, but the favorite at that weight was not an American. A wrestling tournament with no Soviets is akin to a modern ping pong tourney without Chinese players. Bruce would have been a big underdog to Salman (whose name I butchered above). Soslan was the best heavyweight of the 70s. He dominated that decade winning 5 wold level medals in a row and swept most of the soviet national championships (where he had a winning h2h over the man that Bruce could not beat). He was clearly the best at his weight for an extended period of time, Bruce was never. He always took a loss to someone or failed to defend his title. I think sustained dominance (plus the degree of dominance, thought you have to first go on unbeaten streaks for that to really matter) trump longevity and a high floor (constantly getting at least bronze). So I think Bruce is not on Soslan's level. I don't think he's even clearly the best of the group I put him in. You could make a strong case that Salman separated himself from Bruce (given their h2h results).

Bruce only defended a world level title once. Bruce had amazing longevity and was highly decorated over his career, but there are much stronger candidates than him. Medved (who is in a tier of his own among heavies), Ivanitsky, and Soslan are at least a level above Bruce. I think Bruce belongs in this thread. I think of Bruce as in that Khalimov (who was 6-0 against Bruce h2h), Akgul, and Taymazov tier of wrestlers.

I was wondering if Masoumi would jump levels, given his age and weight class. What gave me trepidations was that he didn't look like the great past immature super heavyweight who were either thin-stringy teenish or soft with baby fat. Masoumi has the body and mass of a mature male, and he's had that for a while now. I think the question is more now if Masoumi has a bad match up against Zare, or is he a tier below the creme de la creme tier of international 125kg ers? We'll never see him against taha now, but my guess is he'd be competitive against Geno. Zare was an absolute nightmare for Gwiz, and Gwiz had respectable matches against everyone else. So there is precedent for Zare's style being unusually difficult for some wrestlers.

How any other professions or hobbies are there where you can be the second best in the world and functionally not have a career or accolades? A few maybe, but wrestling is on that very sparse shortlist.

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.