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Yesterday’s news that wrestling will be dropped from the Olympic roster at the 2020 Games has sent shockwaves through the mixed martial arts community.
Adding to the sadness of the removal of one of the few remaining original Olympic sports, and the realisation that future generations will never get to hear Roy and HG commentate Greco Roman again, the MMA community could be left with a gaping hole in one of its biggest development pathways.
Ask any MMA trainer worth his paycheck what the most important skill in MMA is and nine times out of ten they will say it is wrestling.
So often strong wrestlers are able to dictate the terms of a fight and effectively render their opponents skills null and void by using the strength and grappling they originally developed on the wrestling mat.
As MMA has grown it has used the North American amateur wrestling setup as its major feeder system.
Fighters such as Dan Henderson, Randy Couture, Chael Sonnen and Daniel Cormier wrestled at an international and even Olympic level before turning their hand to MMA.
Countless other well-known MMA names and champions hit the mats throughout high school and college, building up the skill base they would eventually employ in the Octagon.
I literally cannot list them all here but trust me when I say it is a lot.
It just cannot be stressed enough how important the North American wrestling system is to mixed martial arts today.
The optimist may say that wrestling moving on is fine, because while it may have mattered in years gone by, MMA has gone mainstream so young athletes will want to train for it anyway and will develop their skills in dedicated MMA classes.
Guys like Rory MacDonald never trained in wrestling at school and they may say he picked it up fine.
They may even more blindly argue that if wrestling is being moved on for a ‘more exciting sport’, as seems to be the trend in the IOC at the moment, then MMA could naturally fit in the hole left over.
However it misses a key and extremely important point.
While the lack of wrestling won’t affect the current generation of fighters, as wrestling loses its IOC ranking so too it loses bucket loads of government and private funding which sustain those amazing school and college development pathways MMA currently relies on.
Remember all those debates about elite sport funding in Australia after the Olympics?
Imagine all that funding but on an American level (they do things bigger there, remember) being taken out of a sport.
Gone will be the dedicated coaches at school, gone will be many of the lucrative tournaments and gone could be many of the big college scholarships which over the years have enticed wrestlers into building up their skills.
And don’t expect them to start offering cage fighting as a sports alternative at school.
MMA will recover from this, don’t get me wrong, however the cancellation of wrestling as an IOC sport has the potential to derail and drastically alter the way the sport currently operates, particularly in its heartland of North America.
But over to you Roarers, how will MMA overcome the loss of ameture wrestling as its dominant development pathway?
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