An American's guide to Olympic Wrestling

Olympic wrestling produces a ton of iconic Olympic moments, because sports heroism just hits harder on a mat.

This is part 7 of RINGS RODGE, a roughly 15-part series where Olympics obsessive and journalist Rodger Sherman breaks down a different sport every day heading up to the 2024 Paris Olympics. You can probably get serious previews of the most popular sports on other sites… here, we’re doing unserious previews of sports that aren’t regularly on TV in between the four years between Olympics. Rodger didn’t really time things right so he’s not going to be able to get to all the sports BUT HE’S GOING TO TRY HIS BEST TO DO AS MANY AS POSSIBLE.

Today: Wrestling, at the request of Eric Lawhorn in the comments! I think I have 2-3 more slots for previews… let me know in the comments if there’s a sport you really want to see covered! I’ll try to get it done (especially if you’re a paying subscriber!)

Why should I care about Olympic wrestling?

Wrestling produces a disproportionate amount of iconic Olympic moments. Don’t believe me? We’re gonna watch Kurt Angle win the Olympic gold WITH A BROKEN FREAKIN’ NECK!!!

Still don’t believe me? We’re going to watch Rulon Gardner, a dairy farmer from Wyoming, taking down the back-to-back-to-back Olympic heavyweight champ Aleksandr Karelin:

There’s a reason pro wrestling promotions invented the concept of “sports entertainment” works with wrestling and not, like, basketball or hockey or even another combat sport like boxing (even though they changed virtually all the rules to invent “pro wrestling.”) Sports heroism just hits harder on a mat.

How does this work?

There are two types of Olympic wrestling: freestyle and Greco-Roman.

Freestyle is more or less the same type of wrestling you’ll see in American high school and college wrestling. It’s slightly different—American amateur wrestling goes a bit farther rewarding wrestlers who can break out of opposing holds—but close enough that there’s a direct pipeline from men’s college wrestling to the Olympics. The six American men’s freestyle wrestlers in Paris won a combined 18 NCAA championships during their college careers, with Cornell’s Kyle Dake and Penn State’s Aaron Brooks winning four apiece. (Our heavyweight, Mason Parris, is bringing down the average with just one NCAA championship during his time at Michigan. Pathetic! JK don’t hurt me.)

Greco-Roman wrestling is supposedly derived from the form of wrestling they did in the ancient Olympics back in ancient Greece… but it seems likely that old-timey Greek wrestling was actually closer to freestyle. It didn’t have that many rules, except no biting, no kicking, and no clothing. Greco-Roman was invented in the 1800s and called “French wrestling” until a rebrand, which got the sport included in the 1896 Olympics in an attempt to appeal to the event’s classical roots, even though it was only a few decades old.

The critical Greco-Roman rule is that competitors aren’t allowed to make any contact below the waist. While most takedown attempts in freestyle start with an attempt at grabbing a stray opponent’s leg, Greco-Roman wrestlers tend to stand around grappling each other’s arms for a few minutes. The end goal is still the same—to pin their opponent’s back to the mat—but Greco-Roman wrestlers have to get there by lifting them up by the torso and throwing them.

Women have been allowed to compete in Olympic wrestling since the 2004 Olympics, but only in freestyle—not Greco-Roman. Don’t ask why—there’s no reason behind it. At some point, the Olympics will have to decide whether they want to add women’s Greco-Roman wrestling or abandon the tradition of having a fake Greek sport in the modern Olympics.

So is this like WWE?

Only in the loosest possible terms. Pro wrestling and Olympic wrestling can both end with pins, but the “counting to three” element was invented by pro wrestling for drama. In Olympic wrestling, just getting both of your opponent’s shoulders to the mat ends the match, even if it’s just for a split second—which is much simpler, but prevents the hero from kicking out after 2.97 seconds. Olympic wrestling refs are also less likely to get distracted by somebody’s sexy girlfriend during matches, making it significantly harder to knock out your opponent with a steel chair while the ref isn’t looking.

However, WWE occasionally brings in Olympic wrestlers for a tinge of legitimacy. We already talked about Kurt Angle—and honestly, that fight just feels like pro wrestling, especially since the Olympics were in Atlanta and was riled up to cheer for the American and boo the swarthy mean foreigner who raised the ref’s arm in an attempt to convince the world he’d won. Angle’s ankle lock submission move was an attempt at selling his past as an actual wrestler, since it vaguely looks like a thing you might do in real wrestling.

His Olympic Slam, however, had absolutely nothing to do with Olympic wrestling—but the IOC got mad at him for using the word “Olympic” without their permission, so he had to change the name.

WWE got so much mileage out of the Angle storyline over the decades that WWE gave trials to two Team USA gold medalists from 2020, Gable Steveson and Tamyra Mensah-Stock. Steveson didn’t pan out—sorta hard to pull the American Hero angle with a guy who avoided prosecution for sexual assault due to a now-closed loophole. But Mensah-Stock recently made her debut under the name Tyra Mae-Steele, showing off some real wrestling moves in the squared circle. Other real-to-fake converts include Greco-Roman Olympian Chad Betts (turned Chad Gable in WWE), Brock Lesnar (who never made the Olympics, but did win an NCAA title) and the Iron Sheik (who won an AAU Greco-Roman title.)

But broadly, there’s not a lot of crossover between the skill sets. Pro wrestling is about high-flying leaps and acrobatics, while Olympic wrestling is about ground-based grappling and creating leverage—the actual post-wrestling pipeline is into MMA, which worked for Olympic wrestlers-turned-UFC stars Henry Cejudo and Daniel Cormier. WWE wrestlers are also supposed to be absolutely massive, while Olympic wrestlers are restricted by weight classes, and are actually sometimes pretty small. (Do not be fooled—the 125-pound guys can still kick your ass.) The football-to-WWE pipeline tends to be a lot more productive.

Are there any GOATs in this year’s Olympics?

Cuba’s Mijaín López might be the most dominant athlete in any sport in Paris. A heavyweight Greco-Roman wrestler, Lopez has won four straight Olympic gold medals dating back to the Beijing games. He doesn’t just win: He didn’t allow a single point against him in the 2012, 2016, and 2020 Olympics. These are the highlights of his gold medal matches, taking the strongest wrestlers in the biggest weight class and rolling them around the mat while they scream and flail.

If López wins in Paris, he’ll be the first Olympian ever, man or woman, Summer or Winter, ever to win five individual gold medals at five Olympics in the same event. (Dutch speedskater Ireen Wust is the only person to win individual gold medals in five different Olympic Games, but she spread her wins over three different events. There’s also Diana Taurasi, who already has five team golds and is going for a sixth in Paris.) Sure, Michael Phelps had more gold medals, but he was able to compete in a bunch of different swim races. If López could wrestle all the guys from other weight classes, he’d have 20-plus golds too.

However, whether López is fit to pull off the five-peat is anybody’s guess. He’s 41 years old, and literally hasn’t competed since Tokyo. (He was able to qualify because another Cuban wrestler secured a spot for the Cuban national team, and the Cubans gave that spot to López.) I guess we’ll have to go off the three times he won a gold medal without allowing a point to determine whether he can win this year.

Rings Rodge, tell us a story!

I am actually a seasoned Wrestling Journalist—my freshman year at Northwestern, I asked to write for the school paper and my first beat assignment was the wrestling team. I didn’t really know what was going on—wrestling is very technical and I was mainly just gawking at the upsetting positions everybody kept winding up in.

But I didn’t really need to know the intricacies of the sport when I was watching Northwestern’s star, Jake Herbert. He went 34-0, won the NCAA championship, and was named college wrestler of the year. The technical terms were irrelevant when the undefeated champ was ragdolling every opponent he faced. He ended up going to the 2012 Olympics and finishing seventh. So I’d pretty much just write about him kicking the crap out of people and never figured out exactly what a takedown was. The moral: Never learn anything—just latch on to people who are very successful.

Is Team USA going to win any medals?

Yeah! We’re elite at freestyle wrestling—Team USA has 123 medals all-time in freestyle, combined between men and women, literally twice as much as the next-best country, Japan, which has 61. We don’t typically win in Greco-Roman—the last American medal was in 2008.

The most likely gold winner is probably 20-year old Amit Elor. She’s the youngest female wrestler ever to represent Team USA in the Olympics… but she already has two world championships. In 2022, she won the World Championship at 18 years old in just 90 seconds, repeatedly spinning her Kazakh opponent until she’d racked up enough points for the mercy rule (a “technical superiority” in wrestling terms) to kick in.

She’s 35-1 all-time internationally, and her one loss was at a junior world championships when she was 15 years old, so we probably shouldn’t even count it. It’s easy to imagine her winning two or three or four golds over the course of her career, but let’s start with Paris.

After that, there’s a long line of other potential gold winners. Kyle Snyder and Helen Maroulis both won gold in 2016 and medaled in 2020, with Snyder winning silver and Maroulis winning bronze. Kyle Dake won bronze in Tokyo and is a four-time World Champ, but he did have to settle for silver at the most recent World Champs after winning 25 straight matches between 2020 and 2023. Zain Retherford won the 2023 World Champs at 70 kg, but he’ll have to cut to 65 kg in Paris. And Domonique Parrish won the 2022 World Championships, although she lost in the first round in 2023.

So that’s… six athletes who have won gold in a major event. We’d have eight, but there were two shocking upsets at the Team USA trials: 2020 gold medalist David Taylor lost to Aaron Brooks—a Penn State legend losing to a new Penn State alum in an event held, conveniently, in State College, Pennsylvania. Brooks hasn’t had any senior-level international success yet, but he just finished college and Taylor had been the king of the weight class, so he could be good enough to win gold. An even bigger shocker was Kennedy Blades defeating 6-time world champ Adeline Grey, the silver medalist in Tokyo.

Long story short, I’ve talked myself into Team USA winning, like, seven-ish wrestling golds in Paris. We’ll see how it goes.