Fifteen millennia of holds, pins, and theatre
Wrestling grapples toward advantage through throws, clinches, locks, and pins—martial art, combat sport, and, in its pro form, athletic theatre. Cave art found in France may push its origins back roughly 15,000 to 17,000 years.
Legitimate competitive lanes include Olympic Greco-Roman and freestyle, folk styles, and submission wrestling; professional wrestling is the crowd-facing theatrical cousin. The English word descends from late Old English wræstlunge. It entered the ancient Olympics at the eighteenth Olympiad in 708 BC and has appeared at every modern Games since St. Louis 1904, after Greco-Roman's 1896 debut (skipped in 1900). Freestyle joined in 1904; women's freestyle arrived in 2004. United World Wrestling, founded in 1912 in Antwerp as FILA, governs the amateur sport.
Reliefs from Babylon and Egypt—Egyptian tombs near 2300 BC and art from about 2000–1085 BC—show familiar holds. Genesis has Jacob wrestling a divine opponent; the Iliad, Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Chinese legends of the Yellow Emperor's jiao di add literary echoes. Greek culture made wrestling central to legend and the Olympics; Romans borrowed the craft while softening brutality. Philosophers from Plato (said to have wrestled at the Isthmian Games) to Marcus Aurelius wrote in and about palaestra culture. Medieval courts in England, France, and Japan patronized the sport; in 1520 Francis I threw Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
American settlers met Native wrestling traditions; the first U.S. national tournament was New York City 1888; NCAA championships began in Ames, Iowa, in 1928; USA Wrestling formed in Colorado Springs in 1983. Lancashire catch-as-catch-can, Scottish and Irish collar-and-elbow lines fed U.S. folkstyle. A French reorganization produced Greco-Roman by the nineteenth century as prize purses and clubs formalized Europe. Oil wrestling is Turkey's national sport with Central Asian roots; shuai jiao claims legendary Chinese histories over four millennia; Swiss schwingen thrives at regional Schwingfests. Mythic bouts—Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Zeus and Cronus, Bhima and Jarasandha—keep reminding cultures that legitimacy itself can be won on the mat.
Source: Wrestling
