British Wrestling – Before London 2012 Olympics

Wrestling in the UK is pretty small in comparison to other countries, and if you look at the talent you have to be impressed.  I mean British wrestling has a membership of just 700, that well is just minuscule when you consider their will be 17 gold medals on offer at the Olympics.  On that basis well, how can we be competitive, well erm the answer is actually we are.  Which is just remarkable, their just must be something special, their must be some fire in the belly somewhere!

Well how have they defeated the statistics, these stats are well erm just against British wrestling!  Well their has definitely been a Ukrainian influence, and well their is the fact that London has the Olympics!  Personally I think we’ll see allot more medals at London as oppose to Beijing where we had zero medals.  We managed 3 medals at the London test event even with 4 injury/illness withdrawals, and 1 under the weather medal hopeful.  So well, as I see it their is just something in the British psyche, and that’s open to anyone who can just unlock it.  However, that’s it! you have to be able to unlock it, and well you need access to do that.  In my mind the whole problems that British wrestling has, rests just on that concept that you need access to it. 

I mean people have to realise just what’s on offer, and if you have people who just well don’t know what’s on offer, you just get nothing.  I do think that some of the Eastern European training partners, have been given an opportunity to see what’s on offer in the UK, and that’s something we just have to be able to do throughout the UK.  These are part of models, and tell us how people get to top level performance.  You see the thing is skills are acquired inter-personally, they are not just these fact based ideas you can download of the internet.  So you need relationships, you need contact with the people with the top skills in the sport, and you need access to training facilities.  What we don’t have however is a wide enough club network, we are well supported in some areas, most notably at the moment around London, but there are huge geographical gaps in the network.  I’m not puting forward a solution, I’m just saying that’s the problem.  For the first time we can see that’s the problem because we can see how things should work with Eastern Europeanswho know how things should work.  It’s not a new problem that we haven’t got a wide enough club structure, it’s just now we can see Eastern Europeans using a model that should be country wide.  It’s more to the point that Eastern Europeans have told us what’s wrong with British wrestling, what we need to do is listen to this.  Well frankly the Eastern Europeans have helped us, and continue to do so, we just need to listen to them.

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This post was written by colin