Nineteen-year-old Ohio State wrestler Kyle Snyder did not win a Big Ten or an NCAA title last season.
A world championship will have to suffice.
Snyder completed a stunning run on Friday through the world championships in Las Vegas, beating Russian Abdulsalam Gadisov at 97kg to become the youngest winner at worlds in US history.
Photo: EPA
Fellow 19-year-old Russian Abdulrashid Sadulaev won his second consecutive world title, beating Turkey’s Selim Yasar 6-0 at 86kg.
Oksana Herhel of Ukraine won in women’s 60kg freestyle, and Azerbaijan’s Haji Aliyev took home the world title in men’s 61kg.
American Leigh Jaynes-Provisor surprisingly won a bronze medal at 60kg.
However, it is Snyder who has emerged as the story of the tournament. Snyder, who lost to Penn State’s Morgan McIntosh in the Big Ten final, is taking a redshirt season from the Buckeyes in what seemed to be a long-shot attempt to qualify for the Rio Games.
Snyder had shown tremendous improvement since his NCAA season ended in March though, and he entered Las Vegas as a dark horse medal candidate.
Now he is the prohibitive favorite to represent the US in Brazil.
Snyder showed wisdom beyond his age by successfully defending a challenge from Abbas Tahan of Iran while he was on the shot clock, drawing a caution point to secure his semi-finals match.
Snyder and Gadisov both scored five points, but Snyder won the final because he had more two-point moMany in the wrestling community have begun to wonder whether Sadulaev — and not American Jordan Burroughs — is the best pound-for-pound wrestler in the world.
Sadulaev certainly made his case with the brilliant series of matches on Friday.
Sadulaev did not get scored on until the semi-finals — at one point cartwheeling over his opponent to escape danger — and did not need the full six minutes until he beat Iranian Alireza Karimimachiani 6-2.
Sadulaev was barely tested in the finals by Yasar, who can take solace in the fact that he was not pinned.
Despite being pinned just 18 seconds into her semi-finals match, Friday was still a big day for Jaynes-Provisor at 60kg, a non-Olympic weight. Jaynes-Provisor, 34, was not even ranked heading into the tournament, and she missed time this summer after she and her husband, US wrestler Ben Provisor, were involved in a car accident on Father’s Day.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier