Wrestling World Championships:
Iran finishes runner-up after mediocre freestyle campaign
A total of four medals saw Iran’s freestyle team finish an average run at the Wrestling World Championships in the second place.
Rahman Amouzad, the last Iranian in action, summed up a forgettable campaign for the country on Tuesday as he failed to stand on the podium after an 8-6 defeat against Russian Shamil Mamedov, representing the Individual Neutral Athletes, in the third-place bout of the 65kg weight class.
Thoroughly tipped for a second successive world gold before the event, Amouzad still bounced back to outmuscle Moldovan Maxim Sacultan 10-0 to secure a wrestling berth for Iran in next year’s Paris Olympics.
Of the country’s 10-man squad, only one, Amirhossein Zare’, managed to leave the Serbian capital with a gold, thanks to a technical-fall victory over Georgian Geno Petriashvili in the 125kg final.
Hassan and Amirmohammad Yazdani, meanwhile, came short in the showdowns with the American opponents to settle for the silver medals of their respective weight classes.
Hassan Yazadni suffered a fifth loss in the sixth head-to-head with his familiar foe David Taylor when he was pinned in the final seconds of the 86kg final to extend his personal tally to a national-high nine major medals.
Amirmohammad looked in impressive form before the 70kg showpiece with Zain Retherford, but clearly ran out of steam toward the end of the contest to concede an 8-5 setback – a second world silver in three years for the Iranian.
With six-time champion Jordan Burroughs absent at this year’s event, Mohammad Nokhodi, beaten by the legendary American in the previous two finals, arrived in Belgrade as the favorite to walk away with the ultimate prize of the 79kg weight class, but he eventually finished with a consolation bronze after an emphatic win against Azerbaijan’s Orkhan Abasov.
Milad Valizadeh (57kg), Reza Atri (61kg), Younes Emami (74kg), Amir-Ali Azarpira (92kg), and Mojtaba Goleij (97kg) all left Serbia empty-handed.
Team USA was crowned the freestyle champion for a second year in a row, collecting 148 points – 38 clear of the Iranian squad – with Georgia in third on 80, while the Russians’ results were taken out of the equation in the team table.
The runner-up finish for the five-time champion, which is yet to lift the team trophy since the 2013 glory, might go down as a decent outcome but the results in Belgrade indicated that more work needs to be done for the Iranians to match the level of their opposite numbers in the American and Russian teams, who shared 13 medals, including five golds, between them.
Eight bouts saw Iranians square off against either an American or a Russian opponent, with Amouzad the only one to come out victorious – a 7-4 win against American newcomer Nicholas Boone Lee.
For all the criticism aimed at the Iranian federation chief Alireza Dabir in recent days – some of which have unfairly been politically motivated – the former Olympic champion could still boast about a brighter future for the sport in the country after the Iranian teams made a clean sweep of the freestyle and Greco-Roman titles in the world cadet and junior championships earlier in the summer.