THE BEAR’S AWAKE!

The most exciting event of the tournament’s third day was probably the Russian team’s powerful performance. It is no surprise, too: everybody is used to Vladimir Gorinov’s team winning. Nevertheless, this time Russian classic style wrestlers were not as good as usual (winning only the fourth place is almost a failure for this team), so the great start in freestyle wrestling was their personal Renaissance. At the end of this first day of freestyle wrestling it is Russians who are at the top in team classification even though they have only one point of advantage over Iranian wrestlers.

It seems now that the freestyle-wrestling tournament is going to be all about confrontation between Russians and Iranians. The first day was significantly finished by combat between Amir Samadi from Iran and Sergey Nikolaev from Russia (55 kilos mass). None of them had let their opponents win even one point before this fight! The Iranian won the first period but Nikolaev managed to reverse the situation and 9 seconds before the end of the second period he was in the lead: 4:3. The third period seemed inevitable but Sergey had suddenly made a mistake that seemd strange for an athlete this good: he went for a risky attack and his opponent did not hesitate to use that. 2:0 and the golden medal in 55 kilos category went to Samadi. The third places had been taken by Andrey Kambur from Ukraine and Niyazi Basaran from Turkey.

Still, that had been a Russian day. Take the final combat in 66 kilos category. Alexander Tsoktoev from Russia had confronted Hugo Passos from Portugal. Both wrestlers had been crushing their opponents all along without even giving them a slightest chance. Alexander had made no exception for highly respected Passos, repeated Deaflympics champion and participant of Olympic games. The veteran was thrown down after two periods by a lopsided score. The bronze in this category went to Plamen Danchev from Bulgaria and Keyvan Samadi from Iran.

The only final combat that included no Russian fighters yesterday was in 84 kilos category. Latifi Mojtaba from Iran and Seifulla Karadeniz from Turkey had it out and the latter turned out to be stronger. Viacheslav Dzebisov from Russia and David Kiladze from Ukraine took the third places.

Both the audience and specialists are always eager to see the super heavyweight wrestling (120 kilos) but this time there has been not much of an intrigue. Russian strongmen’s superiority had been much too obvious. Alexander Khaustov had easily won the gold in classic style wrestling and his teammate Danil Ivanov had actually crushed his opponents in freestyle. In the final combat Ahmad Naseri from Iran was thrown down but even at that point Ivanov did not seem to care who his rival was, so evident was his advantage. The bronze medals in this category went to Mustapha Dede from turkey and Constantin Dzougoutov from the USA. Tomorrow is the last day of the championship and it is promising to be most exciting. Three different mass categories, three series of amazing wrestling, three finals and each of them might be decisive. Which of the two leading wrestling schools is going to prove its superiority: Russian or Iranian?