Cuba, who won the freestyle team title at the Pan-Am Games, absolutely dominated. held this past week in Brazil. They won five gold medals out of seven weight classes, winning five out of seven head-to-head match ups with the US over the tournament. The US came in second, with Joe Heskett, Andy Hrovat, Tommy Rowlands and Mike Zadick winning silver, and Doug Schwab and Daniel Cormier taking the bronze. Henry Cejudo (more on him later) won the only gold. Considering that Cuba and the US were the only countries of any true wrestling merit at the Games, this was not a great outing by Team USA. Cuba, a country of a little more than 11 million people. (For comparison, Illinois has 12 million people.)
This can’t bode well for the US team for the worlds in September. Granted, the US was missing a few of their top athletes, Joe Williams and Steve Mocco, but even with them, Cuba still would have been dominant. When you throw Iran and Russia into the mix, it’s just not pretty. How many freestyle champions can the US feasibly have? Any? Daniel Cormier and Joe Williams are the two most experienced wrestlers on the team. Cormier has shown flashes of brilliance, but that’s all they have been. Flashes. His conditioning and drive are completely unreliable. As for Joe, I look forward to seeing what he can do. He has some consistency, and I think he knows that the next Olympics may be his last chance.
Then of course, there’s Henry Cejudo, the 20 year old 55 kg-er who has stormed onto the wrestling scene. His win over Sammie Henson Matt Azevedo at World Team Trials was undoubtedly a passing of the torch. If he wins Olympic gold next year, he may clear the path for more high school wrestlers to skip college and go straight to Colorado Springs. (I’ll talk about that more in a future post.) He is being called the future of USA Wrestling, and for USA Wrestling’s sake, I hope he is. Our current crop of top wrestlers need to either step it up, or get out of the way. Otherwise, our fond memories of the USA taking home gold from Worlds and the Olympics will be only that, memories.
