Olympic Wrestling

Ancient roots, modern sport

Wrestling appears in art and texts from many ancient cultures and was part of the ancient Olympic Games. Greco-Roman wrestling featured at the first modern Olympics in 1896, and freestyle arrived in 1904. Women's freestyle joined the programme in Athens in 2004.

Freestyle vs Greco-Roman

In freestyle, wrestlers can attack the legs and use their legs to trip or lift. In Greco-Roman, holds below the waist are banned, so the action focuses on upper-body throws, including dramatic lifts. Matches are two periods of three minutes. Points come from takedowns, exposing an opponent's back and pushing them out of bounds, and a pin, or fall, ends the match at once.

Great champions

Cuba's Mijain Lopez won Greco-Roman heavyweight gold at five straight Olympics from 2008 to 2024, the first athlete to win the same individual event at five Games. Japan's Kaori Icho won four straight women's freestyle golds from 2004 to 2016. Russia's Aleksandr Karelin, famous for his reverse body lift, won three Greco-Roman golds.

Did you know?

In 2013 the IOC executive board recommended dropping wrestling from the Olympics. The wrestling world responded by reforming its rules, adding women's weight classes and modernising its governance, and wrestling was voted back onto the programme months later. Today it has 18 Olympic weight classes across men's freestyle, women's freestyle and Greco-Roman. Wrestling is also a core skill in MMA, and many MMA champions began as school or college wrestlers.

In the US, folkstyle wrestling is the version used in high schools and colleges, with slightly different scoring from Olympic freestyle.

Starting out

Many countries have school and club wrestling programmes. Beginners learn stance, motion, level changes and safe falling before live wrestling. Good programmes teach weight management sensibly and avoid extreme weight cutting, which can be dangerous.

Learn techniques only from a qualified instructor in a supervised class, with proper equipment and a partner who knows what to expect.

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