September 27-2013
The Iranian wrestling team won the freestyle World Championships last week for only the sixth time in history.
It was a close fought battle with the Russian team which led in team points until the last match when Iran jumped ahead to win the team title with 46 points to Russia’s 44.
No one else was even close, as third place Georgia had only 29 points.
Of Iran’s seven freestyle grapplers, five won medals and only one failed to score any points. In calculating team points, a gold medal is worth 10 points, a silver medal is worth nine and so on down to the 10th ranked wrestler who scores one point.
Remarkably, Georgia got third place with only a single medal and a bronze at that. But its team came through with a lot of finishers in the top 10 even though they were out of medal range.
Iran’s two freestyle golds were won by Hassan Rahimi at 55 kilos and Reza Yazdany ay 96 kilos.
In last year’s Olympics, Rahimi finished eighth and Yazdany fifth and limped off the mat with a gimpy knee. They clearly learned a lot in the last year. Both men were powerhouses. Rahimi won his semifinal match 8-0 and Yazdany won his semifinal 8-1.
They both faced bigger challenges in the finals, however. Rahimi fell behind before eking out a 2-1 victory over Amit Kumar of India, who is only 19 years old and came in 10th in the Olympics. Yazdany won his final 4-2 by defeating 2010 World Champion Khetag Gazyumov of Azerbaijan. Gazyumov beat Yazdany last year to take the bronze away from him at the Olympics.
Iran pulled down two golds, one silver, two bronzes and a 10th place finish in freestyle for its 46 points.
The complete results are shown in the accompanying tables. The final column, marked #, is the number of competitors in that weight division.
Altogether, the Iranian freestyle team won 27 matches and lost only five. The five losses were to Belarus, Cuba, Russia and twice to the USA. One of the losses to an American was in the 74-kilo gold medal round where American Jordan Burroughs—the most prominent American wrestler of this decade—won his third straight world championship at the expense of Iran’s Ezzatollah Akbari.
But it was Akbari who gave Iran the team title. Going into the final hours, Iran trailed Russia 44-37 and Akbari had to win at least a bronze for Iran to take the team title. When Akbari upended his Uzbek opponent in the semifinals, that guaranteed him at least a silver and Iran the team title. The loss to Burroughs was a personal loss but not a team loss.
Burroughs beat Akbari 4-0 but the score obscured the fact that Burroughs seemed to be confounded by Akbari’s low stance. Burroughs picked away patiently and eventually scored a pair of force-outs and then a snap-down and spin behind to triumph.
With 73 countries sending freestyle athletes, 29 countries won medals. The USA came in fifth with 25 points and Canada was 27th with three points.
This was Iran’s sixth freestyle victory in decades of wrestling World Championships. But the last two were in 2002 and 1998 when Iran was the host. The host usually has a leg up in the results. The last time Iran won the team title without hosting the championships was in 1965, almost a half-century ago. Iran also won in 1961 and 1956, neither of which it hosted.
The outcome in Greco-Roman wasn’t nearly as good for Iran. With 29 team points, Iran ranked fourth behind Russia (43), South Korea (37) and host Hungary (31).
Iran won two gold medals—just as in freestyle—but had no other medals, although two other grapplers scored points.
Perhaps the strangest match in Greco-Roman was the 84-kilo gold medal round. There, Iranian Taleb Nariman Nematpur won with a 5-3 victory over Azerbaijan’s Saman Tahmasebi. But just one year ago at the Olympics, Tahmasebi, who was born in Sanandaj, was wrestling for Iran and came in 11th.
Overall, the Iranian Greco-Roman team won 15 matches and lost six. The team lost once each to Japan, Denmark and Armenia. The bete noire was host Hungary, to which Iran’s men lost three matches.
In Greco-Roman team scores, the United States ranked 10th and Canada won no points at all.
The team scores show clearly the impact of the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, which dominated wrestling for decades, routinely walking off with the team title, now faces a lot of competition from grapplers who used to be teammates. Of the 15 countries that used to part of the Soviet Union, four were in the top 10 freestyle teams this year and eight were in the top 20. In Greco-Roman, four were in the top 10 and seven in the top 20.
On the other side of the coin, the breakup of the Soviet Union means Iran must face a lot more talented wrestlers. In the old days, the second best wrestlers in the Soviet Union wouldn’t make it to the World Championships. Now they are sent by Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and other states of the former Soviet Union.
