I think everyone is missing another huge point here.

Russia, India (an emerging power) and the middle east have one massive advantage over North American wrestlers. Numbers. Plan and simple, the athletes in those countries respect, love and want to be wrestlers. Generally, Canadian and American wrestlers either come from wrestling families or happen to stumble into the sport. Usually wrestling is a 3rd, 4th or even 5th choice for kids. Or most common, a way to stay in shape in the winter after football season.

Just like if the USA were to play Russia at football, the score would be ridiculous because all American kids know football and watch football. Or worse, if a group of pee-wee Canadian hockey players weret to take on New Zealand's Men's team, I assume the score would be pretty close. It's just a matter of culture. More kids know about and love wrestling in Russia than they do in North America.

I would bet that there are more wrestlers in the US than Russia. Wrestling is only hugely popular in a few limited areas like the Causcus states. Polpulation does not explain how an area like Ossetia or Chechnia can produced many worlds champions. I believe there are only a few million in each of those areas.

Just like the wrestling hotbeds in the US the reason is coaching and competition.

Also how do explain a country like Cuba being better than us?

I would say that they are freaks of nature, every year my coach takes a select few from his team down there to train and everytime i hear the same thing, that they are atheltic monsters. everyone and i mean everyone has a phoneminal gymnastics background, even the heavy weights can do multiple back hands spring leading up to a back flip, plus you cant always say cuba is better, they are pretty hot and cold at the worlds, and one more thing and i think this is more important than most give credit for is their life style, these people are poor as shit, this makes them tougher then the average north american and correct me if im wrong but it gives them a great incentive to do better at the WC and olympics

odh, we may have more wrestlers wrestling folk, but look at the open brackets. I can almost guarantee cuba russia, almost all the other countries have more competitors

Originally Posted by FRED

odh, we may have more wrestlers wrestling folk, but look at the open brackets. I can almost guarantee cuba russia, almost all the other countries have more competitors

Agreed. We have more wrestlers but we are doing a different sport.

I don't see that. I don't see a lot of Russian freestylers using judo techniques. They use greco techniques more than judo (back arch vs sweeps).

Originally Posted by arm-spin

Regarding fleeing the hold; it happens but it's rare. Not sure what the official FILA rule is but when I was competing in Canada, you basically had to back right out of the ties repeatedly get penalized. Simply "stalling" won't do it.

Someone pointed out on themat.com that there's a strong correlation between jr. world titles and sr. level success. I'm pretty sure each sr. freestyle champ this year except Kumar is a jr. world champion. Canada has real trouble doing any damage at the Jr. worlds. We seem to develop our 'imports' pretty well but have trouble gettin our locally born athletes to succeed at the jrs. I don't know how it is in the United States, but I know that the last two American jr. world champs- Jenkins and Bradley- are competing for college teams rather than training to be world champs. The Russian, Iranian, Azeri etc jr. world champs are competing against, and often beating, the sr. level freestyle wrestlers on a regular basis.

I agree that this is a problem. The issue is that the NCAAs pack the house and is a path toward a great education. Until the USAW can match that, we will be behind in technique and development at the senior level.

I think it has less to do with the difference in styles (folkstyle being so popular in the States) and more to do with priorities. When training overseas in some of these premier wrestling countries, you quickly notice that wrestling is their lives. It's just not like that in North America.

We're soft in comparison, in my opinion.