Aug 21 – Wrestling

So today we woke up to a wild down pour of nice Beijing rain. While being here in Beijing, I got the chance to see how hard it actually rains here, which is pretty crazy, because a light rain is pretty much a down pour – the streets get all backed up with like 6inches of water and for the people who live in the city I’m sure it’s a pain, because the water just piles up, so it gets kind of hard to get around. Anyways so we decided that we wanted to go watch some wrestling today because one of our friends was competing so we put our rain coats on, grabbed our umbrellas and went over to cheer him on.
Although he didn’t win his match is was nice to go watch some other sports besides judo - even though wrestling is pretty close to judo, still nice to go watch.

So as everyone probably knows I used to be National champion in wrestling as well as judo, so I know what the rules are and how the scoring goes. Well recently, I also heard about the NEW rules because a lot of people have been complaining about how bad the new rules make wrestling, well they were right – it’s almost bad enough that I don’t want to watch it anymore. They are going to need to change the new rules because they are horrible for the sport, and it is losing its attraction.

I’ll just explain one rule to you, so that you understand what I am saying – oh yeah and this is how the Canadian girl lost the bronze medal match, well actually a lot of people lost their matches like this. Anyways she lost 1- 1?? So, does that make any sense to anyone, well let me explain. She scored on the girl around the half way mark making it 1-0, well with 5 seconds left the other girl ended up scoring a point making the match tied right?? Well you would think so, but NOPE - the person who scores the last point wins the match, which means if you are behind and come back to tie things up – well you not only tie it up YOU WIN!. Which is crazy, they don’t have overtime – it’s just done! They say the matches are too long, well wrestling used to be offensive, meaning lots of action, well now it’s all defensive and hardly any points are scored – the wrestlers don’t work on the ground because they are scared to get scored on. So honestly it has change the sport so much, that you can even see the look on people’s faces when they win, or loose in that situation, which happens 90% of the time. Such a bad call to change the rules, and that is only one rule, the other ones are just as bad. Everyone who I have talked to about them doesn’t like them, and thinks that the sport is not fun to watch.

Anyways now the international judo federation wants to change some of the rules for judo as well, and the rules they are thinking about bringing in, are also pretty bad – we will just have to wait and see what happens, hopefully they keep the same draw system and only change some of the scoring because it will also make our sport totally different. Anyways after that we headed back to the dorms and rested for the afternoon by watching some sports on TV, we would like to go and watch in person, but the tickets are hard to get, even for athletes! Tonight we headed out to the BUD CLUB again, which was pretty good; there are a lot more athletes who are finished competing now, so it is packed in there. After the club we headed back to the apt to get some sleep.