Wrestling has a fair claim to be the oldest competitive sport, and it has always had two faces. These stories run from Egyptian tomb walls and Milo of Kroton to college mats and Olympic finals, where the results are real, and on to fairground troupes, masked luchadores and television stars, where the drama is written in advance. Along the way: a final stopped by darkness, a Swiss prize bull and a famous slap on late-night television.
Every tile in a Wrestling game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Legends
nine stories
1Six Olympic crowns and a very gentle grip
On the tile: Milo540 BCLegend
Milo of Kroton, a Greek from southern Italy, wore the victor's crown at Olympia six times. He won the boys' wrestling in 540 BC, came back eight years later and took five men's titles in a row. Ancient writers said he would grip a pomegranate so tightly that nobody could take it from him, yet never damage the fruit. Those tales are legend, but the end of his run is more down to earth. In 512 BC, probably forty or older, he lost to a younger challenger who avoided him and wore him out.
2The president whose wrestling record depends on who you ask
On the tile: Lincoln1831Legend
The National Wrestling Hall of Fame honored Abraham Lincoln as an Outstanding American in 1992, but his matches survive mostly in the memories of old neighbors, who did not agree. His 1831 bout with Jack Armstrong, leader of the Clary Grove boys in New Salem, Illinois, is remembered as a Lincoln win, an Armstrong win and a stalemate. Afterward the two were friends. As president, Lincoln asked an old friend what had become of Lorenzo Dow Thompson, the man who threw him in 1832, and joked about giving him a post office.
At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Estonia's Kristjan Palusalu won heavyweight gold in both freestyle and Greco-Roman. Only he and Sweden's Ivar Johansson have won Olympic titles in both styles at a single Games. Palusalu had taken up wrestling at 21, while serving in the navy. After the Soviet Union annexed Estonia in 1940, he was sent to a labor camp. He escaped, was caught and sentenced to death, and was sent instead to the front against Finland. There he slipped across to the Finnish side, and made his way home to German-occupied Estonia.
Dan Gable went 64-0 in high school and 117-0 at Iowa State. Then, in the last match of his college career, the 1970 NCAA final, he met Larry Owings, a University of Washington sophomore who had dropped two weight classes to face him. Owings led 13-11 with 17 seconds left and held on. Gable came to call it the match that turned him into a great wrestler. Two years later, at the Munich Olympics, he won gold without a single opponent scoring a point on him in six matches.
5Unbeaten in college, then a boxer, then a strongman
On the tile: Danny Hodge1956
Danny Hodge won all 46 of his bouts for the University of Oklahoma, 36 of them by fall, and no college opponent ever took him down from his feet. At the 1956 Melbourne Olympics he held a comfortable lead in his championship bout until a disputed fall at the edge of the mat, two seconds from the end, gave the title to a Bulgarian. After college he turned to boxing and won a national Golden Gloves title. Later, as a professional wrestler, he tore telephone books in half and crushed apples to pulp.
Yojiro Uetake came from Japan to Oklahoma State and never lost a college match: 58 wins and three NCAA titles. After his sophomore season, in 1964, he went home and won Olympic gold at the Tokyo Games, and in 1968 in Mexico City he became the first Japanese wrestler to win two Olympic titles. His matches drew coaches and rivals from all over the arena, who watched them like clinics. His college coach, Myron Roderick, said, "I don't know how good he was, because I never saw him challenged."
Tricia Saunders grew up in a wrestling family in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and competed nationally against boys as a youngster. In high school she had no chance to wrestle. When women's wrestling became an international sport in the late 1980s, she came back to the mat. In 1992 she became the first American woman to win a world wrestling title, and she won three more. She retired in 2001 without ever losing to an American opponent, and she was the first woman inducted as a Distinguished Member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
In 2003 an American, Sara McMann, beat Japan's Kaori Icho at the Klippan Open in Sweden. It was the last match Icho would lose for almost 13 years. In 2004 women's wrestling made its Olympic debut in Athens, and Icho met McMann again in the 63-kilogram final and won, 3-2. She won again in Beijing and London, and in Rio in 2016 she trailed Russia's Valeria Koblova with five seconds left and still took the gold. That made her the first woman to win individual gold medals at four consecutive Olympics.
9Five straight golds, then he left his shoes behind
On the tile: Mijaín López2024
Mijaín López's first Olympics, Athens 2004, ended in fifth place. Then the Cuban Greco-Roman heavyweight, nicknamed El Terrible, won gold in Beijing, London, Rio and Tokyo, and in Paris in 2024, just short of his 42nd birthday, he won again. That made him the first Summer Olympian in any sport to win five consecutive golds in the same event. After the final he took off his shoes and left them in the middle of the mat, the traditional sign that a wrestler is retiring.
1The ancient-sounding style from 19th-century fairs
On the tile: Greco-Roman1800sMyth busted
Greco-Roman wrestling sounds as old as Olympia, but the style grew up at European fairs in the 1700s and 1800s, where it was known as French wrestling or flat-hand wrestling. United World Wrestling says Jean Exbrayat, a soldier from Napoleon's army, is generally credited with its early rules, including the ban on holds below the waist. As sports leaders urged a return to the ancient values of Greece and Rome, the style took its classical name. The organizers of the 1896 Olympics treated it as a reincarnation of ancient wrestling.
In Schwingen, Swiss wrestling, each man grips his opponent by a pair of short over-trousers, and to win a bout he must put the other man on his back with both shoulder blades touching the ground, all without letting go of that grip. The sport can be traced as a contest of Alpine herders to about 1600, and its national federation was founded in 1895. At the biggest festivals, held every few years, the winner is crowned Schwingerkönig, king of the Swiss wrestlers, and his prize is a young bull.
Every year in Edirne, Turkey, pehlivans, or wrestlers, pull on kıspet, thick trousers of water buffalo or cow leather, lather themselves in olive oil, and grapple for the Kırkpınar Golden Belt and the title of chief pehlivan. The festival opens with forty bands of davul drums and zurna shawms. The story goes that it began in the 1300s with soldiers who wrestled for training, and that two brothers among them wrestled for hours until both died. The name Kırkpınar, forty springs, is thought to come from that legend. UNESCO added the festival to its heritage list in 2010.
4The ancient Olympic event that allowed almost anything
On the tile: Pankration648 BCLegend
Pankration, a combination of boxing and wrestling, was one of the toughest events at the ancient Olympics, and the Greeks believed Theseus had invented it when he defeated the Minotaur in the labyrinth. The rules banned only biting and gouging an opponent's eyes, nose or mouth. Kicking a man in the stomach was perfectly legal, and fighters punched without the leather hand wraps that boxers wore. United World Wrestling dates its Olympic history to 648 BC, and a modern version is practiced today with strikes to the head forbidden.
5Iran's house of strength, where the drummer recites epics
On the tile: ZoorkhaneToday
In Iran, the Pahlevani ritual takes place in a zoorkhane, a domed building with a sunken, eight-sided arena. Ten to twenty men perform gymnastic routines with instruments that stand in for ancient weapons, while a master called the morshed recites epic poems and beats time on a goblet drum. United World Wrestling says Pahlevani wrestling began as training for warriors, and wrestlers may grip each other's belts and trousers, which reach below the knee. UNESCO added the Pahlevani and zoorkhane rituals to its heritage list in 2010.
Styles of wrestling in which opponents hold each other by the belt are practiced around the world, so the international federation for belt wrestling gathered them under one name: Alysh, a word with roots in ancient Turkish that means fighting to determine the strongest. Competitors wear white trousers, a blue or green jacket and a flexible red belt, and they try to throw each other while holding on. A throw that lands the opponent on his back scores six points, and the first to six wins. Men's bouts last five minutes, women's four.
7Olive oil, fine sand and a scraper called a strigil
On the tile: Ancient Greece708 BC
Wrestlers in ancient Greece competed naked, their bodies coated with olive oil and then covered with a thin layer of fine sand, which United World Wrestling says protected the skin from the sun in summer and the cold in winter. After wrestling, they scraped the layer off with an instrument called a strigil and washed with water. For the Greeks, wrestling was the most important training a young man could have. At Olympia it joined the program in 708 BC, both as an event of its own and as the deciding contest of the pentathlon.
8Beach wrestling fits its rules into a circle of sand
On the tile: Sand Circle2004
Beach wrestling was codified by the international wrestling federation at its 2004 congress in Athens, to bring together the traditional styles wrestled on sand around the world. The rules are simple. Barefoot wrestlers in shorts or bathing suits meet inside a sand ring seven meters across for a single three-minute period. Bringing the opponent to the ground, or pushing any part of him out of the ring, scores one point. Exposing his back during a takedown or throw scores three, and the first wrestler to three points wins.
9Women's wrestling reached the Olympics a century late
On the tile: Athens 20042004
Women's freestyle wrestling joined the Olympic program at Athens in 2004, a hundred years after men's freestyle first appeared at St. Louis. The international federation had been building the women's sport since the late 1980s. The first Olympic women's program had four weight classes, which United World Wrestling says arrived after the number of men's categories was reduced. At Rio in 2016 the women's program grew to six classes, in line with the men. Greco-Roman, the other Olympic style, is still contested only by men.
1An early TV wrestling star and his imaginary perfume
On the tile: Georgie PinsLate 1940s
When Americans were buying their first television sets in the late 1940s, one of live TV's first superstars was a wrestler with bleached, carefully waved hair. Gorgeous George, born George Raymond Wagner in Nebraska, had twice been amateur champion of Texas, but he sold spectacle. He entered to Pomp and Circumstance while his valet sprayed the ring with Chanel No. 10 from a sterling silver spray gun. There was no such perfume. He tossed fans gold-colored bobby pins he called Georgie pins, and the crowds, often unruly, paid to see him.
Kayfabe is pro wrestling's word for keeping up the illusion: staging scripted matches as real and staying in character outside the ring. It is often explained as pig Latin for be fake, but Merriam-Webster points out that pig Latin would turn be fake into ebay akefay. Other guesses trace it to carnival slang, and etymologists admit nobody has pinned it down. Wrestlers even used it as a verb, and the wrestler Gorilla Monsoon, Freddie Blassie recalled, had a New Jersey license plate on his Lincoln Continental that read K-FABE.
For four decades El Santo, the Man in the Silver Mask, wrestled in Mexico without ever losing his mask in the ring, and he starred in more than 50 films in which he took on zombies, vampire women and Martian invaders. He guarded his identity even in retirement. Then, on January 26, 1984, he lifted the mask on a Mexican television talk show without warning. Less than two weeks later he died, and he was buried wearing the silver mask. About 10,000 people came to say goodbye.
André the Giant was billed at 7 feet 4 inches from his early matches in Montreal, two inches taller than the basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. When he was measured at 24, in 1970, he stood 6 feet 9.75 inches. His famous 15-year unbeaten streak was promotion too, since pro wrestling results are scripted. Some stories needed no stretching. Growing up in rural France, he and other local children sometimes rode to school in the back of a pickup truck driven by a neighbor, the playwright Samuel Beckett.
5The boxer, the wrestler and fifteen very strange rounds
On the tile: Ali vs. Inoki1976Legend
On June 26, 1976, the boxer Muhammad Ali met the Japanese pro wrestler Antonio Inoki in Tokyo, reportedly for six million dollars. What was supposed to happen is still disputed: some said the finish was meant to be fixed, while Inoki's camp said Ali's side learned late that it was a real fight. The rules were rewritten so that Inoki could not throw or tackle Ali and could kick only with a knee on the mat. So Inoki spent most of 15 rounds on his back, kicking at Ali's legs. It was scored a draw.
6Pro wrestling's first stars worked the fairgrounds
On the tile: Steel Eaterc. 1830
Professional wrestling began in France around 1830, according to United World Wrestling. Wrestlers shut out of the elite formed traveling troupes and shared the fairgrounds with animal exhibitors, tightrope walkers and bearded women. Showmen billed them with names a modern promoter would envy: Edward the Steel Eater, Gustave d'Avignon the Bone Wrecker, Bonnet the Ox of the Low Alps. Anyone in the crowd who could knock one down was promised 500 francs. By the end of the century pro wrestling was the most fashionable sport in Europe, until arranged matches and false nationalities tarnished it.
7The comedian, the King and a slap on late-night TV
On the tile: Andy Kaufman1982
In the early 1980s the comedian Andy Kaufman, famous as Latka on the sitcom Taxi, took up a side career as a wrestler who faced only women. That led to a feud with Jerry Lawler, a star of Memphis wrestling, and in 1982 the two confronted each other on David Letterman's late-night show, where Lawler slapped Kaufman and Kaufman answered with a stream of curses. The feud looked real. It was not: Lawler later admitted it had been completely staged, and said the two were close friends behind the scenes.
8An Olympic champion who mastered the scripted game
On the tile: Kurt Angle1996
Kurt Angle won NCAA titles for Clarion in Pennsylvania in 1990 and 1992, the 1995 world championship at 100 kilograms, and Olympic heavyweight freestyle gold at the 1996 Atlanta Games. In 1998 he joined the World Wrestling Federation, where the results are scripted, and he took to the new craft quickly: in late 2000 he won the WWF Championship. By Olympedia's count he went on to win 12 world championships across several promotions, a real Olympic champion who became one of the best-known performers in the other kind of wrestling.
Frank Gotch, an Iowa farm boy trained by Farmer Burns, won the world championship in 1908 in Chicago from George Hackenschmidt, the famed Russian Lion, after the two had spent some two hours on their feet. Then he cashed in like a showman. He starred in a play that toured the East Coast and Europe, and he traveled with the top circus of the day, taking on all comers. President Theodore Roosevelt invited him to the White House twice, and his 1911 rematch with Hackenschmidt, at Chicago's new Comiskey Park, drew about 30,000 fans.
1Darkness halted the first modern Olympic wrestling final
On the tile: Schuhmann1896
The only wrestling event at the 1896 Athens Olympics had no weight limit and no time limit, and a wrestler lost by being thrown onto his back. Germany's Carl Schuhmann, a gymnast who stood about five feet two, beat the much bigger British weightlifter Launceston Elliot. His final against Greece's Georgios Tsitas went 40 minutes before darkness stopped it, and Schuhmann won 15 minutes into the next morning. He was the first known Olympic wrestling champion since Aurelius Helix of Phoenicia in AD 213.
2The Olympic match that lasted 11 hours and 40 minutes
On the tile: Martin Klein1912
At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, Martin Klein and Alfred Asikainen wrestled for 11 hours and 40 minutes in the Greco-Roman middleweight tournament, outdoors under a hot sun in the Olympic Stadium. Klein, an Estonian competing for the Russian Empire, had discovered wrestling after taking a job as night guard at a St. Petersburg wrestling club. He won, but he was so exhausted that doctors would not let him wrestle the final, and Sweden's Claes Johanson took the gold by default. It remains the longest wrestling match in Olympic history.
At the 1972 Munich Olympics, Chris Taylor of Iowa State weighed more than 400 pounds. On August 30, in the freestyle tournament, he beat West Germany's Wilfried Dietrich, a 38-year-old nicknamed the Crane of Schifferstadt, by decision. A week later they met again in Greco-Roman. Dietrich managed to hook his fingers together behind Taylor's broad back, hoisted him and threw him over onto his shoulders, pinning him in 3 minutes 14 seconds. The throw became known in Germany as the throw of the century.
Going into the Greco-Roman super-heavyweight final at Sydney in 2000, Russia's Aleksandr Karelin had not lost a match in 13 years and had won the last three Olympic titles. His opponent, Rulon Gardner, was the youngest of nine children from a dairy farm in Afton, Wyoming. The score was level after the first period. In the second, with the two locked together, Karelin broke his grip first, and under a recent rule change that gave Gardner a point. Gardner held on through overtime and won, 1-0.
5The year wrestling was nearly dropped from the Olympics
On the tile: IOC Vote2013
In February 2013 the International Olympic Committee's executive board recommended dropping wrestling from the 2020 Games, though it had been part of every modern Olympics except Paris 1900. Two former champions, Bulgaria's Valentin Yordanov and Russia's Sagid Murtazaliev, returned their gold medals in protest. Wrestling rebuilt itself fast, giving women and athletes a role in decisions, adding two women's weight classes and changing rules to reward attacking. The United States, Iran and Russia all backed the campaign. On September 8, in Buenos Aires, wrestling won its place back with 49 votes.
6The upset that ended Saori Yoshida's 14-year reign
On the tile: Maroulis2016
Saori Yoshida of Japan won 13 world titles in a row and Olympic gold in 2004, 2008 and 2012, and from 2002 to 2016 she went undefeated in major championships. In the 53-kilogram final at Rio in 2016 she took an early 1-0 lead over Helen Maroulis of the United States. Maroulis came back to win 4-1, handing Yoshida her first defeat in a major tournament in 14 years, and became the first American woman to win an Olympic wrestling gold. She later became the first American woman wrestler to qualify for three Olympics.
7A judoka who switched sports and won Japan a gold
On the tile: Shohachi Ishii1952
Shohachi Ishii was a top judoka, but after World War II he had to give up the sport when American occupation forces banned judo. He switched to wrestling. At the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, in the bantamweight freestyle final round, he beat India's Khashaba Jadhav and then a Soviet wrestler, both by unanimous decision, to become the first Japanese athlete to win a gold medal after the war. Jadhav's bronze was historic too: it was the first individual Olympic medal won by an athlete from independent India.
8A perfect senior season, and a title at 125 pounds
On the tile: Anthony Robles2011
Anthony Robles was born with only one leg, and at Mesa High School in Arizona he went 48-0 in each of his last two seasons. At Arizona State he wrestled at 125 pounds, and as a senior in 2010-11 he went 36-0, though he was never ranked No. 1 until the NCAA Championships, where he was the top seed. In the 2011 final he beat the defending champion, Matt McDonough, 7-1, and was named the tournament's Outstanding Wrestler. The next season he came back to Arizona State as a volunteer coach.
About four thousand years ago, the governors of an Egyptian province were buried in tombs cut into the cliffs at Beni Hasan, above the Nile Valley, and some chose to cover their walls with wrestlers. The tomb of Baqet III shows about 220 pairs, and to keep the tangle of arms and legs readable, the painters made one man in each pair red and the other dark brown. The nearby tomb of Khety adds 122 more pairs. United World Wrestling reads such scenes as evidence that Egypt already had wrestling rules and referees.