GrandOlm

I think I've noticed that a grappling style's popularity is largely dictated by how many practitioners there are in country. Not how offensive/exciting the rules are. Judo is big in France because it's in the education system and a lot people get exposed to it. Freestyle is big in America because it's considered the continuation of your Folk Style career, former folk wrestlers can follow their favorites stars in Freestyle after they graduate. I'd say every grappling style is off putting and strange to the majority of people, if they never practiced that specific art. Greco was popular in areas like small town cold-Scandinavia, just so happens that the areas where Greco was popular were particularly susceptible to the declines that dissipate wrestling.

80% of the finalists in the European championships are of Russian wrestling region origin. And people think the new rules are too restricive. UWW can't be loving this. For all the complaining about how boring and unpopular Greco is, Freestyle is at least as dead as Greco on the European mainland.

That's the same thing as getting rid of Greco. It would be no gi Judo. Completely different sport with completely new skill set. If Olympic Champions would be novices after rule changes, then there is no continuity. Greco is upper body wrestling with an emphasis on throws and pins.

Makes sense. That's around the age you would have been conscripted. Unlikely he would have ever wrestled otherwise, folk styles did not persist in Europe.

Maybe training wise, but Gable is a decent student of the history of wrestling. Gable talked about how much he admired Taha Akgul and considered him his favorite wrestler. I bet if you put some NCAA wrestlers on the spot and asked them to name their favorite non American wrestler, they'd either give a terrible answer (something something one match at a time something something don't wrestle the flag but the man) or they wouldn't have one because they don't care.

Also I think if Gable made a clean break with wrestling and left and that was that it, fine, but that he fell flat on his face on not one but two other endeavors and then comes "crawling back" to wrestling because of NIL money. Is it not a very human reaction for parts of the wrestling community to have a feeling of schadenfreude over that trajectory? About the "I had a WWE dream". He tried football and is probably leaving for mma. So I think the the he doesn't value wrestling as much theory is backed by a lot of evidence and it's not just an obsession with WWE.

I don't really follow mainstream sports so I was mainly going off the sports that I do know, but yes that's big a counter example I was wrong about that. Though my guess is that it's still rare (maybe I'm wrong but that's my guess). And I don't agree with you on whatever you disagree with me on, I think.

I don't think it's outrage. I just think it's natural to not root as hard for someone in wrestling when clearly don't like/value wrestling as much as other wrestlers. I personally don't follow college wrestling much, I'm just speculating on why this guys I know about from international wrestling is getting the reactions he is.

Bo Nickal quit for the same reason why the vast majority of wrestlers eventually quit. He wasn't good enough to win at the level he needed to in order to continue wrestling . He lost at team trials, naturally that was his end. No one would hold it against him if he came back for a Cinderella run at some team trial. What Gable did is very rare (and demeaning to wrestling). The only comparison that is coming to my mind is Borg retiring from tennis at 26. But Gable's case is even worse than Borg's, since Borg was not at the very top of the tennis world when he left. He had just lost in the most important tennis tournament in the world, Wimbledon, after being a defending champion with a long winning streak and then lost again at the US Open (which he never won) to the same person.

Because life and competitive endeavors in general have in built mechanisms to make people quit if they are not as good?

Gable did imply through his actions and words that wrestling is "too small" for him to fulfill his ambitions. How is the wrestling community supposed to react to that? Having some self respect for yourself instead of joyfully demeaning your activity as a stepping stone for some man's career.

No kidding. There was a segment saying that Gable was a super genius of wrestling, that he could destroy anyone in the world and the history of wrestling, would tech Milo of Croton, Medved, Karelin, and Taymazov on the same day without breaking a sweat, and only over lost because he was a teenage puppy dog facing grown men. How can the mid 20s version of that lose to Hendrickson, who in the grand scheme of wrestling is very typical.

So Riza ha been banned for 4 years due to doping. Unless the Turkish government pulls every string in the book ( I don't think they will for a late 30s year old athlete who has been losing a lot), he's done. His quote about the situation makes no sense. Riza makes the excuse that "he retired from wrestling' so he doesn't understand why they're targeting him. The only reason he "retired" is because the ban forced him to. I think he'd wrestle in these European Championships if he never got popped. Everything blew up in his face after he lied about retiring after Tokyo, to continue his chase for the Olympic Gold. Embarrassingly pinned in your home town hero tourney meant to celebrate you and your career, lose a world championships in the last seconds with a push out, find out the man who owns you is coming back to stop you in Paris, have UWW and the Turkish press hype you to the moon over breaking Karelin's record (they lied/made that up, he technically wouldn't have even if he did win) only to have your coronation derailed by a terrible mistake where you get thrown and pinned in the final, then gets destroyed by a young Iranian wrestler in what with hindsight is almost certainly your last match, and to finish if off get banned from the olympics for a drug violation, nullifying the reason you kept wrestling in the first place and staining your legacy as a drug cheat. What an unmitigated disaster, should have retired after Tokyo as the clear world nr. 2 unlucky to be in Lopez's era and just moved on to politics/bureaucracy. Geno's career is complete with the Olympic Gold win. He's an olympic champion, the highest honor in the sport, and no one can ever take that away from him. He is also too old and not good enough to strive for beating wrestling's records and at the same time he's already won everything you can win. I don't know what motivates him personally and financially, but I'm not surprised to see him skip these Euros.

No Riza. Still serving his grug suspension or did he finally let it go.

In John Smith's era and before, it was not uncommon for Americans to view "amateur wrestling" as something like post grad or an overseas study trip. You did it for a couple years (wherever you happened to land in the Olympics cycle after college wrestling), hopefully you medaled at the Olympics and then you'd move on with your life to get a "real job". The economic situation was that these guys were getting nothing for wrestling. A fully paid head coaching job opens up and you're not wrestling anymore. If Smith and wrestlers of that era were given the economic security to wrestle as long as they were competitively viable like every Burroughs or Snyder can today, they wouldn't have retired at 26 and probably would have had much larger medal hauls (I think the Eastern Bloc won so much more medals in the cold war era partly because their wrestlers were professionals in all but name, like modern American wrestlers). Yeah there were a couple counter examples like Baumgartner or Rulon and the like. But it was bleak being an international wrestler in the US all the way to the 2000s. You were just hoping to cash in on the notoriety of the Olympics.

This isn't about figure heads of national teams or getting wrestlers who were already good and taking credit for them. Who was the best at developing wrestlers?

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.