Wrestling at the 2020 Summer Olympics

The format for wrestling at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics was basically the same as in 2016 at Rio de Janeiro. Men competed in both freestyle and Greco-Roman disciplines, with six events in each, while women competed in six events of freestyle wrestling. There were some minor changes in the weight classes. With the World Championships having 10 weight classes, this necessitated many of the wrestlers shuffling weight classes to be able to compete at the Olympics, often not at their ideal weight.

As in Rio, each match was decided by cumulative scoring for the match, unlike classifying by number of rounds won, as at some previous Olympics. The competition format consisted of a single-elimination tournament with the two finalists facing off for gold and silver medals.

Each wrestler who lost to one of the two finalists moved into the repêchage, culminating in a pair of bronze medal matches featuring the semi-final losers each facing the remaining repêchage opponent from their half of the bracket. The other repêchage wrestlers were the athletes who had lost to the finalist in the quarter-finals and round one. Each bout consisted of a single round within a six-minute limit.

Tokyo wrestling had 287 competitors with 191 men and 96 women taking the mat. They represented 60 countries, 54 for men and 34 for women. Twenty-six (26) nations won medals, led by Japan with five gold medals and seven medals, followed by the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) team with four golds and eight medals. The United States won the most medals overall, with nine, including three gold medals, which were all won in freestyle, four by the USA women and five by their men.

Japan dominated the women’s competition with four gold medals in the six events, while the USA also won four medals on the female side, one of which was gold. The ROC men wrestlers won all of their medals to lead the men’s competition with eight medals and four golds, followed by the USA with five medals and two golds, while Cuba also won two gold medals in men’s events.

Individually the biggest story was the victory of Cuba’s Mijain López in super-heavyweight Greco-Roman. For López this was his fourth consecutive victory in the event, making him only the ninth Olympian to win individual gold medals at four consecutive Olympics, and only the seventh to do so in the same event, joining Ray Ewry (USA-ATH; 1900-08 standing high jump and long jump), Paul Elvstrøm (DEN-SAI; 1948-60 one person dinghy), Al Oerter (USA-ATH; 1956-68 discus throw), Carl Lewis (USA-ATH; 1984-96 long jump), Michael Phelps (USA-SWI; 2004-16 200 m individual medley), and Kaori Icho (JPN-WRE; 2004-16) (Icho’s titles were in slightly different weight classes).