Sportsfolio

History & origins

The story of Wrestling

Wrestling appears in cave paintings 15,000 years old and in the earliest written records of Sumer and Egypt, which makes it a strong candidate for the oldest sport still contested. It survived as folk tradition almost everywhere — Iran, India, Turkey, Japan, Mongolia, Senegal — and those traditions still supply most of the sport's elite.

Milestones

10 moments that shaped the modern game.

  1. c. 3000 BCE

    The earliest depictions

    Tomb paintings at Beni Hasan in Egypt show hundreds of distinct wrestling holds, many of them still taught today, alongside Sumerian carvings of the same period.

  2. 708 BCE

    Added to the ancient Olympics

    Wrestling entered the Greek Games as part of the pentathlon and then as a standalone event, contested until a competitor conceded.

  3. c. 1500

    Pehlwani and kushti

    Persian and Mughal traditions merged in South Asia into pehlwani, practised in earth-floored akharas under a strict regimen of diet and discipline that continues today.

  4. 1896

    The modern Olympics

    Greco-Roman wrestling was contested at the first modern Games in Athens, in a single open weight category.

  5. 1904

    Freestyle joins

    The St Louis Games added freestyle, initially an American folk style, and the two disciplines have been contested separately ever since.

  6. 1912

    The eleven-hour match

    A Greco-Roman semi-final in Stockholm lasted eleven hours and forty minutes before officials declared a result. Time limits followed shortly afterwards.

  7. 2004

    Women's freestyle at the Olympics

    Women's wrestling was added at Athens with four weight classes, and Japan won two of the first four gold medals.

  8. 2013

    Dropped, then reinstated

    The IOC voted to remove wrestling from the 2020 Games. A global campaign, governance reform and rule changes to make matches more watchable saw the decision reversed within eight months.

  9. 2016

    India's women break through

    Sakshi Malik's bronze in Rio was India's first Olympic wrestling medal by a woman, and accelerated a shift already visible in the country's akharas.

  10. 2021

    The unbeaten era

    Wrestlers such as Abdulrashid Sadulaev and Kaori Icho set standards of sustained dominance — Icho became the first woman in any sport to win four individual golds at four Games.