BingBumpier
BingBumpier
Wrestling is probably the oldest organized sport humans have. Cave paintings in Mongolia, tomb art in Egypt, and Greek vase paintings all show recognizable wrestling holds and stances. Most cultures that wrote anything down wrote down their wrestling.
The Olympic Games include two wrestling styles. Greco-Roman, introduced in 1896, forbids holds below the waist — you cannot grab legs or use them to trip an opponent. The result is a torso-focused sport with dramatic throws and a heavy emphasis on upper-body strength.
Freestyle wrestling, added for men in 1904 and for women in 2004, allows the use and grabbing of legs. It is faster, more open, and looks more like the folkstyle wrestling that high school and college athletes in the United States grow up with.
Almost every region has its own wrestling style. Mongolia's bökh is part of the Naadam festival and has no weight classes — winners are crowned partly on style and ceremony. Senegal's laamb is a national obsession, with top wrestlers earning more than soccer stars. Japan's sumo combines wrestling, religious ritual, and stagecraft in a form that has barely changed in centuries. Turkey's oil wrestling at Kırkpınar is exactly what it sounds like — wrestlers covered head to toe in olive oil. Iran's pahlevani tradition mixes wrestling with strength training in an ancient gymnasium called a zurkhaneh.
The version most Americans encounter is folkstyle, which rewards control on the mat more than freestyle and is the basis for high school and NCAA wrestling. Folkstyle is what feeds the Olympic teams — most US Olympic medalists wrestled folkstyle through college and then converted to freestyle or Greco-Roman after.
Worth saying: WWE and similar promotions are scripted entertainment built on top of real wrestling fundamentals. The athletes are real athletes performing choreographed matches with pre-determined outcomes. It is its own art form, but it is not the same activity as Olympic or collegiate wrestling, and treating them as the same thing tends to annoy people in both communities.
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