Fights outside the mat

Russian wrestlers won nine medals at the World Championships

The world wrestling championship has ended in Guangzhou, China. The Russians won nine medals in the men's Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling tournaments - three gold, two silver and four bronze. Compared to the previous World Championships in Budapest, there were more medalists, although they lost in the quality of awards won. In China, the “classics” have four medals, of which one is gold and three are bronze; a year ago the Russians had one medal of each denomination in their luggage. The freestyle wrestlers had four gold medals in Budapest, now they have half as many, plus two silver medals and a bronze medal.

One can consider the last championship as a kind of experiment before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. The experiment was unsuccessful. The results of the wrestlers’ performances were not so much a reflection of serious miscalculations in the training process, but rather highlighted the entire range of problems existing in world wrestling. Before the start of the championship, the training camps of both teams - the "classics" in Khabarovsk, the "freestyle" in Vladivostok - were disrupted due to lack of funds. Rossport was ready to pay only part of the required amount. As a result, already from the first days of the championship, many athletes complained of problems with acclimatization, which actually resulted in problems with sleep, fatigue and even fainting.

With the existing strict competition schedule, when fights sometimes take place at intervals of 15-20 minutes, the safety margin was not enough. But the most important thing is that time was lost, because if the training camp had taken place, it would have provided invaluable experience before the Olympics. “We talk a lot about preparations for the future Olympics, but things don’t go further than talk. For free, without investing in preparation and experiments, you can’t win the Games. And there’s not much time left before Beijing,” Shamil Nevretdinov, one of the coaches of the freestyle wrestling team, told a Vremya Novostey correspondent.

The wrestlers taught us to hold them to the strictest standards. “We only count gold,” the national team coaches ambitiously declared just five years ago. Today, a bronze medal is considered a good catch for the Russian national teams. Over the past years, Russian teams cannot boast of consistently high results. And it’s not just about experiments with squads and coaches. Over the past ten years, the rules in this sport have changed many times. If you take the struggle of ten years ago, its appearance has changed one hundred percent. In an effort to please television and the pursuit of entertainment, the International Wrestling Federation (FILA) has ensured that both types of wrestling have become incomprehensible not only to spectators, but also to the athletes themselves. “I cannot call what is happening on the mat now Greco-Roman wrestling. This is a completely different sport,” multiple Olympic champion Alexander Karelin has said more than once. And indeed, the script of a wrestling match somehow does not fit with the word “objectivity”. After all, the notorious coin can significantly influence the course of the meeting.

However, the goal that FILA leaders have been pursuing over the past years - to distribute earrings to all sisters - has been achieved. The “classics” medals, for example, after the championship in China went to 16 countries. Of the 160 countries that are members of FILA, many are subsidized by this organization and support the initiatives of the federation. Although it is obvious to everyone that the new rules level the class of wrestlers and deprive one or another country of the opportunity to be a trendsetter in this sport.

Will such a policy lead to FILA cutting off the branch on which it sits? If wrestling, for the reasons stated above, loses popularity in countries where it has traditionally been strong, then this sport may even find itself outside the scope of the Olympic program. Take the numbers: in the USSR more than 250 thousand people were engaged in wrestling, now in Russia only a third of this figure. The average age of trainers is 45-50 years. Work with children for a salary of just over 3 thousand rubles. There are only a few people interested per month. And the schools themselves are sorely lacking. And it is possible that not only mentors, but also the athletes themselves will switch to new types like fighting without rules. Where there is more money and plenty of popularity.

Olga ERMOLINA