Rio 2016: Olympic Wrestling Preview Day 6: Men’s Freestyle 57kg & 74kg

We’ll begin this preview of Day 6 as we will all future previews, with a link back to our Olympics Wrestling primer, which has a cheat sheet and live stream details. Also a link to NBC’s wrestling webpage where you can find video streams. And here is a link to CBC’s streams for all you Canadians (or global citizens with computers that are pretending to be Canadian for now).

Also a note that wrestling brackets are random draw and uneven. You can check out the brackets from the 2015 World Championship and the European Olympic Qualification Tournament to give you a better idea of what the Rio brackets will look like.

All to the point that picking place finishers before the weigh-ins are completed and brackets are released (which happens the day before each tournament) is a fool’s errand. Which is perhaps why I find it so much fun.

Men’s Freestyle 57kg

PICKS

GOLD: Hassan Rahimi IRI

SILVER: Yowlys Bonne CUB

BRONZE: Vladimer Khinchegashvili GEO

BRONZE: Sandeep Tomar IND

CONTENDERS

Georgia’s Khinchegashvili and Iran’s Rahimi were in an epic gold medal battle in last year’s world championship, which Khinchy won with a text book duck under with seconds left in the match. They are now both former world champs and are expected to come home from Brazil with shiny metal discs.

Cuba’s Bonne is a remorseless slaughtering machine who’s every match is appointment viewing. This is likely his last Olympics so you’d be wise not to miss him. India’s Tomar is this year’s Champion of Asia who I like as a dark horse medal contender.

OTHERS OF NOTE

After finishing his collegiate career at Iowa with a loss in the NCAA finals, American Dan Dennis spent a couple years roving out West, living out of a pickup truck and climbing the occasional mountain. He came back to the sport a little over a year ago, training at his alma mater. Dennis didn’t miss a beat, promptly winning the Olympic Team Trials and punching his ticket to Rio. Expect to see an NBC soft-focus entertainment story about him right about now.

Though I don’t have a taped confession, I believe Russia’s Viktor Lebedev is responsible for ruining the Russian National Championship tournament earlier this year due to match fixing. He also has a dreadfully boring wrestling style. But he’s also a 2X world champ and plenty of people still think he’s good enough to win in Rio. I don’t believe that to be the case unless a few refs fly home with suitcases stuffed full of undeclared, illicit cash, but please don’t let my controversial speculation influence your opinion of the man’s quality or talent.

North Korea’s Yang wrestles very infrequently but when he does, he often wins gold, as he did at the 2009 and 2014 World Championships. Japan’s Higuchi is a young up and comer who should also not be overlooked.

RANKINGS

1 GEO Vladimer KHINCHEGASHVILI

2 IRI Hassan RAHIMI

3 CUB Yowlys BONNE

4 MGL Bekhbayar ERDENEBAT

8 KAZ Nurislam SANAYEV

10 JPN Rei HIGUCHI

11 IND Sandeep TOMAR

13 TUR Suleyman ATLI

15 USA Daniel DENNIS

16 ROU Ivan GUIDEA

18 ARM Garnik MNATSAKANYAN

19 SEN Adama DIATTA

20 UZB Abbos RAKHMONOV

AZE Haji ALIYEV

BLR Asadulla LACHINAU

BUL Vladimir DUBOV

KOR Junsik YUN

MAR Chakir ANSARI

PRK Kyong-Il YANG

Men’s Freestyle …

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