September 01, 2017
by Warren L. Nelson
Iran’s freestyle wrestling team collapsed at this year’s Wrestling World Championships while its often second-rate Greco-Roman team surged impressively.The freestyle team ended up in lowly 10th place with a mere 16 points, which was less than half the points scored last year and just one-third the point score of two years ago. It was the fewest number of points scored this century.
The Greco-Roman team, on the other hand, racked up 36 points, its second best total of this century, and came in third, behind Russia, which dominated Greco-Roman, and Turkey.
The Greco-Roman outcome was odd. Iran came in third as a team although it pulled down no gold or silver medals. It success was not due to the fact that it had any first-rate performers, but because it had a huge number of second-rate performers. Of Iran’s eight grapplers, six scored points.
(In wrestling, the gold medalist gets 10 points, the silver medalist nine points and so on down to one point for the 10th placed wrestler in his division.)
The most impressive result was produced by Mohammad-Ali Geraei in the 71-kilo division. Geraei won a slot in the bronze medal round, where he soon found himself down 0-7 to his Moldovan rival. Geraei then shifted gears and went on to win 10-8, pulling down Iran’s first medal of the championships.
The exact opposite was true for the Iranian team in freestyle, where Iran’s 10th place team finish was due entirely to Hassan Aliazam Yazdanicharati, the only Iranian wrestler to win a gold medal this year and the only one to win any medal in freestyle.
Yazdanicharati was overwhelming and dominating. In his five matches, he beat a Kazakh 12-2, a Moldovan 10-0, an Azerbaijani 10-0, a Russian 4-0 and, in the gold medal round, a Slovak 10-0.
Yazdanicharati gave Iran 10 points of its freestyle total of 16. Three other wrestlers came up with scores of three, two and one point. The remaining four Iranian grapplers all finished with no points.
The accompanying tables show how Iran’s wrestlers performed. The next-to-last column in the big tables shows the Iranian wrestler’s ranking in that weight division. The final column (marked #) shows the number of wrestlers entered in that division.
“Repechage,” also called “wrestleback,” is a system that allows a wrestler who loses early to a dominant wrestler to have a second change at a bronze medal. Its import can best be seen in the Greco-Roman table in the 75-kilo weight division. Saeed Morad Abdvali lost his very first match to the Serbian wrestler. But the Serb went on to the finals. That put Abdvali into the repechage, where he defeated a Kazakh and that gave him entry to the bronze medal round, where he overwhelmed his Belarusian opponent 8-0.
The annual World Championships were hosted in Paris this year.
