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Wrestling in Paris | The Point Magazine

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In late August of 2017, a legion of gladiatorial men and women from the world’s backwaters descended on Paris to determine who, in a series of weight classes, were the best wrestlers on the planet. Not pro wrestling—turnbuckles, thrown chairs and all that—but the real deal: spandex, cauliflower ear, weight cutting, the heady whiff of groin reek and Hellenism. The occasion was the World Wrestling Championships, which took place at the AccorHotels Arena, a kind of postmodern colosseum on the Seine—directly across the river, in fact, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and a few blocks from the Opéra de la Bastille. No one involved appeared to find this funny or dissonant. For the sport’s fanatical devotees, there was immense and almost intolerable hype surrounding the event. This was because a handsome 21-year-old prodigy with a bowl cut named Abdulrashid Sadulaev, from the mountains of Dagestan, had made it known some months before that he would be bumping up from the 86-kilogram

In late August of 2017, a legion of gladiatorial men and women from the world’s backwaters descended on Paris to determine who, in a series of weight classes, were the best wrestlers on the planet. Not pro wrestling—turnbuckles, thrown chairs and all that—but the real deal: spandex, cauliflower ear, weight cutting, the heady whiff of groin reek and Hellenism. The occasion was the World Wrestling Championships, which took place at the AccorHotels Arena, a kind of postmodern colosseum on the Seine—directly across the river, in fact, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and a few blocks fro

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