Women wrestling, Canada Summer Games (2017) | Marcel Druwé / CC BY 2.0
To an outsider, the sport of wrestling might seem like a monolith—a muscular clump of writhing barbarity. But on January 17, when the members of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) made the landmark decision to add women’s wrestling as an official championship sport, they faced a procedural question with subtle but important philosophical implications: What “style” will the women compete in?
In the United States, two wrestling subdisciplines predominate: folkstyle and freestyle. Folkstyle, the eternal bane of American middle schoolers crying “uncle” during gym-class wrestling units, is our established domestic style of wrestling. Pee-wee wrestling leagues, high school state championships, and the men’s NCAA tournament all abide by folkstyle rules. Meanwhile, the authoritative style for the high-profile international competitions—above all, the Olympics and World Championships—is freestyle. Elite American wrestlers must therefore excel at freestyle to compete at the sport’s pinnacle, and this association with global prestige lends freestyle an air of glamorous cosmopolitanism. (On the topic of international wrestling, it bears mentioning that an additional style known as “Greco-Roman,” a nineteenth-century continental European approximation of ancient Greek wrestling, enjoys considerable worldwide popularity and is an Olympic event for men only. But most Americans view it as an inscrutable second-tier style, and our Greco-Roman athletes—with notable exceptions—seldom find much overseas success.) As for the two major styles, both folkstyle and freestyle are descendants of the English catch-as-catch-can wrestling tradition, but they have evolved along divergent lines to favor two distinct skill-sets: Folkstyle requires more rugged endurance, while freestyle caters more to refined technique.
Folkstyle or freestyle, then—which will it be for the collegiate women? This question comes at the culmination of a heartening coast-to-coast movement to promote gender equity in a sport with a reputation as the most macho and male-dominated athletic domain this side of football. Two decades since the Olympics first included women’s wrestling as an event in 2004, the opportunities to Wrestle Like A Girl have never been more exciting. College powerhouses such as the University of Iowa have already built up world-class women’s teams that compete outside of the NCAA’s formal oversight. At the high school level, girls’ wrestling is the fastest-growing sport in the country. I’ve witnessed this boom firsthand on the team I coach: At Phillips Exeter Academy, the New Hampshire boarding school where novelist-to-be John Irving famously fell in love with the sport, we currently have a school-record ten girls on our 30-person roster. And now, at long last, America’s best wrestling women will be given the chance to do what the men have been doing since 1928: duke it out at “March Matness” for a coveted NCAA title.
Unlike the men’s side, though, the women’s NCAA championship will be contested in freestyle. In the January decision, the NCAA treated this matter as a foregone conclusion, and the outcome is widely considered a beneficial alignment with the international standard. American men are regarded as wrestling at a disadvantage when they transition to freestyle for the Olympics after spending most of their career committed to folkstyle, in contrast to the Russians and Iranians who have been training Olympic-sanctioned freestyle since they were wearing diapers under their singlets. If we’re not hamstrung by historical convention, goes the argument, would we want to replicate this problem for our women wrestlers? By way of analogy, if we had the chance to start from scratch and choose Imperial or metric, would we stick with gallons and feet, or would we get with the program and opt for the logical, globally popular liters and meters? (And the wrestling decision is arguably more consequential, since there aren’t any Olympic medals to be won in the sport of measurement!)
But here’s the thing: in terms of the rule-set, freestyle isn’t any more logical than folkstyle. On the contrary, folkstyle is actually governed by a far more consistent internal logic than freestyle. Folkstyle wrestling is a sport that hinges on the crucial matter of control: Can you control your opponent, and can you prevent your opponent from controlling you? You score points by taking your opponent down (going from a neutral position to a position of control); by holding your opponent’s back near or against the mat (controlling your opponent’s shoulder blades); and by escaping from underneath your opponent (wriggling free from your opponent’s control). With a balanced allotment of points assigned to each of these actions, the folkstyle scoring system incentivizes wrestlers to control the situation from all three positions: neutral, top, and bottom. When I’m coaching my high schoolers, I can’t afford to emphasize one position at the expense of another—my wrestlers can score all the takedowns they want, but if they don’t know how to get up from bottom, they’ll have a tough time winning their matches.
Freestyle, however, trades folkstyle’s balanced coherence for an erratic agglomeration of miscellaneous objectives. It’s partly about being flashy: You score more points for spectacular “grand amplitude throws” that lift your opponent impressively high in the air, even if you don’t manage to land in a controlling position. It’s partly about rolling around: If you hit a quick flurry of leg-laces or gut-wrenches, spinning your opponent across her back for the most fleeting of instants, you can end the match then and there. It’s partly about waiting it out: To counteract those all-powerful leg-laces and gut-wrenches, the accepted strategy is to stall in a starfish position until the referee decides to whistle the sequence dead and let you back up to your feet. And, most infuriating, freestyle is partly a sport about scoring last: There’s apparently no time for overtime, so if the match ends in a tie, whoever has scored the most recent points is usually declared the winner.
To be clear, as illogical as some aspects of freestyle seem to me, I’m not barging in with the Stars and Stripes to demand that the world bow to the American Way and drop freestyle for folkstyle. I understand that there are many wrestling aficionados with perfectly legitimate reasons to prefer freestyle, and I fully accept freestyle as the definitive international style of our sport. (And for what it’s worth, I personally enjoy watching freestyle at the big tournaments, or when there’s no folkstyle on.) But with the NCAA women set to wrestle freestyle domestically, I’m worried that the American wrestling community has gotten so blinded by the putative prospect of additional Olympic gold that we have chosen to pursue it by dealing a deathblow to the balanced, beautiful national treasure that is folkstyle wrestling.
This might sound like a slippery-slope argument—after all, who’s to say the women can’t commit to freestyle while leaving the men to keep on with their folkstyle? Plenty of sports exhibit a degree of gender-based dimorphism: Men’s lacrosse is a much higher-contact game than its women’s counterpart, and men’s and women’s gymnastics comprise almost entirely different sets of events. But as of the 2024 Olympics, the freestyle specialists of the US women’s wrestling team have already opened up a slender but not insubstantial achievement gap over the US men’s former folkstylists: The women won two golds and four total medals in Paris, compared to no golds and three total for the men. If this solidifies into a trend, the pragmatic case to give our best wrestling men a better grounding in freestyle will grow ever stronger, and more voices will join the already-sizeable chorus—which includes such wrestling superstars as four-time NCAA champion Yianni Diakomihalis—calling for men’s college wrestling to abandon its folkstyle roots.
And what a devastating loss that would be. Folkstyle wrestling is just as precious to the American sporting psyche as any of our country’s most inspiring athletic traditions. Rec Hall and the Snake Pit are no less hallowed than Fenway Park and Augusta National. Legendary Oklahoma State coach Ed Gallagher was as much of a genius as “father of American football” Walter Camp. The Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association predates the Southeastern Conference by nearly three decades. Through the sport of folkstyle wrestling, every wrestler in America—everyone who has ever shaken hands with an opponent and chosen to abide by our balanced and coherent rule-set, match after match—has helped cultivate a thing of rare beauty. But that beauty survives only as long as we continue to nourish it: If we stop wrestling folkstyle in America, folkstyle’s done being wrestled. It becomes an anthropological curio dusted off once a year at the old county fair, or a fossilized artifact discussed in arcane seminars by historians of sport. Will we accept such a lamentable fate, all for the chance at a few extra gold medals every four years?
So of course I’m happy that American women have earned their rightful place on the wrestling mat, but part of me can’t help but see the NCAA’s recent decision as a significant missed opportunity. Because rather than procuring a momentous step forward for women at the potential cost of an exquisite national sporting legacy, we might have achieved the one while simultaneously protecting the other. We could have had a women’s folkstyle national championship! But that was not to be. Instead, we’re left to marvel at the skill and athleticism of the women who will wrestle for freestyle glory—and to hope the men can keep the folkstyle flame alive.
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