MHSN

Congrats to Bulgaria. they were clearly the better team. Nikolov (the big one) really deserves the MVP award already . yeah I know how FIVB works. Bulgaria has to win the whole thing to make that happen

ah , another 4th place after the Olympics. today is just not the day for our sport.

last year he needed the green light from the Iranian WL federation to participate. that didn't happen. our federation blocked his participation but since June/July his 1 year waiting period is expired and he is eligible to compete this time. he is a very shitty person, so obviously I wish him the worst of luck.

this is gonna hurt forever , I'm sure I will never forget that 2nd set mistake. everything was going well until that moment in set 2. Sharifi spiked out a very very easy overpass on 22-20 which could seal the set for Iran and I'm pretty sure it could become an easy 3-0. this was the golden chance we will probably never have again. and Sharifi threw it away. it will be hard for him to come back from this. fans will make sure he will never forget that. but that was the coach's duty to somehow recover the team, make them start fresh in the next set but they just never came back from that. it was a terrible tournament anyway. technically we didn't deserve a top 16 finish but then some weird things happened and all of a sudden we only had to beat a mid level European team to be in the World Championship semifinal....

They are not part of this World Championship. CWF athletes results won't be included in WCh results. they just mixed this tournament with Commonwealth Games qualification.

oof, that was a hell of a match indeed a rollercoaster After the terrible disastrous first round the expectations were very low for this match but they played much better today and deserved the win, probably even better than 3-2. Iran deserved to get eliminated last round, The Philippines won that match (almost) only this moment saved the team, that fist touching the net after a clear kill block on match point. that fist already gave us a 8th place finish. let's see how far that fist can carry us in this tournament

by my count, Egypt had two medal contenders here. Abdellatif Mohamed (your last minute withdrawal) had a good chance for the bronze. I was also counting on Mustafa Alameddine to be a serious medal threat, he was on the original entry list but had been removed few weeks ago

winning 4 golds, 2 silvers and 2 bronzes out of 10 wrestlers is our best ever result in Greco-Roman. Iran won the team title with 180 points, more than twice points as the runner-up our Greco team did great, but the last match was sad and disappointing, first Mohmadi has to blame himself for losing 3 finals in a row, this is his 3rd World/Olympics final and he lost them all. second there were some questionable calls as expected. obviously they wouldn't let Iran to win more than 4 gold medals easily. but again Mohmadi has to blame himself. he did a big big mistake. he could and should take matters into his own hands. but that's OK, maybe it was better for wrestling in general to give medals to different countries. I can understand that. Obviously after the Olympics some big names retires, some takes a year off. that wasn't the case for Iran, simply because our team is very young. (most of them 22, 23 even 18, 19) so we came here with full power and won lots of medals. the next two years before the Olympics will be tougher. it won't be easy to repeat this result. it may never happen again, in Greco it's just really hard to be dominant. freestyle is still much more popular here but Greco is catching up.

Iran participates in women's international sports wherever possible. in some sports you simply can't participate with those Islamic code dresses. and in some cases (like Judo) the international federation has some strict rules against it. (FIBA for example gave the green light only few years ago) those sports not being able to participate internationally are at least active domestically (national championships etc) but Boxing and Wrestling aren't active at all. why ? I don't know, nobody knows but I can guess. I think when they were reviewing the sports one by one to reactivate them after the 1979 revolution. those super religious stupid guys decided that some sports are only masculine and women should never try them. (even for domestic competitions) some traditional sports like wrestling, weightlifting and boxing are among those banned sports. after years and years of trying finally weightlifting managed to leave that black list. our new boxing federation also promised the same (no sign of that happening yet) you may ask why Wushu, Muaythai or Kickboxing are active and boxing are not. those sports are probably more masculine I can guess because they are newer sports, didn't exist in 1979 to get the initial "No". with this stupid regime when something gets a No, it's just hard to change it. I know it doesn't make sense. it's stupid.

1. totally different things. Iraq under Saddam was a one-man dictatorship. if I'm not wrong he was secular himself but just a bloody ruthless dictator (like Bashar al-Assad) he and his sons could do whatever they want IR Iran on the other hand is a theocracy. it's much more complicated. they care about the public opinion to some degree. (but not about their redlines) let's say the political system in Iran is a mixture of democracy and dictatorship, which is a weird and unique combination. the outcome is disastrous though. 2. in some Islamic countries another thing stops women from being active in sports, the culture. for example MBS opened up everything in KSA but it will take years and years to change the culture there to see Saudi women competing in all sports. Iraq is facing the same issue. specially in Southern parts of the country. Iran on the other hand is the exact opposite. 3. yeah that was a bloody terrible disastrous war for 8 years. normally it should be very hard/impossible to forget but surprisingly from our point of view everything is forgotten. not sure about the Iraqi's view but I assume that's the same, I know they don't like Iranian regime meddling in their political businesses but this is a new thing, not related to the war. let's say the public opinion here blamed that war on Saddam himself, not the people of Iraq. so when he was gone, the tension was gone too.

two completely different things, Islamic countries are totally different than each other Turkish government is based on secularism, the current regime in Iran (The Islamic Republic) is based on Islam (I mean their own version of Islam which is different than any other country) OK I have to give you a long answer, let me explain the basics of the situation in Iran since this regime came to power in 1979 (after toppling the previous bloody dictator) they made a rule forcing women to cover their hair/body/curves etc. they also stopped women's sports completely at the time. during all these years women fought hard for their rights, LOTS of things changed since then, if you walk in Tehran nowadays you see lots of women walking around with nothing on their head. for now the regime has other problems to deal with, and let that go. (not sure if that's forever or just for now) you also can google 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, that's the worst protest this regime had seen so far. as for the women's sports, that started in 1990 with Shooting (the sport with less movement) then Canoeing (another sport with less movement) and slowly other sports joined the club. right now every Olympic sport is active here (except boxing and wrestling) some of them like Swimming doesn't participate in international competitions for obvious reasons though. if you watch Iranian women in any sport, they have a very loose Hijab, just something on the hair to satisfy the government. women here came a very long way to be here. bcz if we look back at 1990, that shooting team at the 1990 Asian Games had to participate under something called "Chador" (you can google it, that's super religious) so what will happen next? I don't know. as long as this delusional old man lives I don't expect much more. women for sure will fight for their rights, not sure how much more they can gain from this old man. but after he dies finally (he is 86) we can go in a very good direction or maybe in a very bad direction (North Korea way) or even worse . it's just unpredictable. lots of good or bad or even worse scenarios can happen in that important day. and yes there are some political forces here pushing for such things more or less but they don't have the power. that old man does and he is taking the country down with himself.

unfortunately women's wrestling doesn't even exist in Iran. girls try some kind of traditional wrestling (which is much more clothed) here and there but nothing about the Olympic wrestling yet. I think from the Olympic sports only wrestling and boxing are not active at all among the women here. lots of talks about activating women's boxing but wrestling is still a no no. hopefully that changes in future but that's unlikely anytime soon, as long as this regime exists with their stupid religious ideas. but who knows weightlifting was also a no-no at first but eventually became active since 2018. things change, unfortunately in a slow rate.

no we sucked big time in Greco at the time. we became relevant in Greco-Roman only since 2005 but he is very well known in our wrestling community, he is in Zagreb right now and I see our team members taking pics with him. so yeah he is well respected here, same as Mijain Lopez.

I really can't remember any controversy in his matches, he was really good, very very good actually. but of course that was long time ago and without internet we couldn't watch all of his matches to judge better. but there are lots of videos available on the net from his matches, you can see he was just a monster. a match between Karelin and Lopez would be fantastic.

well this is a sensitive matter this is the list of top guys in UWW, that gives you an idea. some (not all) of these guys are very powerful, specially Mamiashvili and Ruziev, of course and Lalovic himself https://uww.org/about-uww/bureau-members but I have to say the officiating is much much better comparing to 20 years ago. for example in Paris I saw only one very very very bad call (obvious cheating) in favor of Uzbekistan. some former Soviet countries create their own units sometimes, I mean we see Uzbek refs support the Kazakh wrestler and therefore the Kazakh referee support the Uzbek wrestler in another match. after years of watching wrestling, I feel more relaxed when I see the ref is from US or Japan or western Europe. (excluding Germany ) as I said there is a culture of cheating in this sport, this is getting better and better, UWW under Lalovic did lots of good things but still a long way to go.

for years Mr Michel Dusson was a key member of former FILA (and current UWW) and was in center of lots of scandals in this sport. (ask Guenot brother how they won their Olympic medals) I don't think France has influence in the current UWW. but it was not about their influence, it was just UWW's desperate try to help more countries winning medals. (specially a strong sporting nation like France) and Iran already had too much success in that day. or maybe I'm just too delusional and it was just one very bad referee and of course because of the strong protest from the Iranian delegation, Ghanem was being watched closely in the final and got penalized when he headbutt Ganizade. in a normal world Ghanem had to be disqualified and suspended for a long time for what he did in the QF. even in MMA you don't leave the cage with those number of injuries.

One match yesterday made everybody upset and angry here. This is the handiwork of Ibrahim Ghanem at 72kg quarterfinal. for the entire match he hit Danial Sohrabi all over his face with punch, slap, headbutt, shoulders and eventually ended up winning the match bcz of the end of Sohrabi's bleeding time ! (per UWW rules you have 4 minutes of bleeding time) Sohrabi came back the next day to win the bronze, with a shaved head. swollen blue eyes (both), lots of stitches on his lips, one eyebrow and his chin. Ironically the abusive French guy did that again in the final against Ganizade in the last minute leaving him bloody. only this time the refs weren't corrupt/terrible and penalized him and therefore he lost the gold he never deserved.

We were expecting good results from the Greco team but they did even much better . the team title is already in the bag (by a huge huge margin) + 3 gold, 1 silver and 1 bronze + 2 more finalists tomorrow and a small chance for another bronze. winning 7 or 8 medals in Greco is just great. Greco is much more universal than freestyle. we were never traditionally good in Greco-Roman, our success is recent, this is only the 2nd time in history winning the team title.

The Greco team had a nearly perfect start today, 3 out of 4 made it to the final (including a 18 years old debutante) and the other one simply lost to a much better wrestler and will wrestle for bronze. we had the strongest Greco team in the World in past few years but never won the team title with this generation. (Iran won the title in Greco just once in 2014) considering we still have 3 Olympic finalists to wrestle in next couple of days, I think we are in a very good position to win the Greco title as well. hopefully this time with more than just 2 gold medals I think 7 gold medals is within our reach, hopefully they take half of that 3 or 4 maybe

This is probably the worst tournament ever for the Iran NT since i remember, I mean even with we had a 2nd tier team in Asia we never played this bad. by some miracle Iran just survived this group and will play another match in round of 16 (I assume that will be our last match) The Philippines had 5-6 match points and in 2 of them they served out very very narrowly. and they even somehow won the match, I turned off the TV the moment the ball touched the floor. few minutes later I found out they are still playing. Philippines deserved to win this. they played great, 10 times better than my expectations. couple of their guys were unstoppable today. Iran was extremely lucky in at least 3 of those match points. Iran did good with Roberto Piazza in VNL but his decisions in this tournament were really questionable. few times that crossed my mind that maybe he is trying to lose the match. I knew he is a very good coach but after this I'm sure anymore

https://vk.com/uww_tv?z=video-226829894_456239188%2Fvideos-226829894%2Fpl_-226829894_-2

he has the best agent ever, selling him to top teams (clubs and now NT) over and over probably the most successful conman in the world

the number of surprising results in this tournament is just tooooo much looks like everybody can beat everybody

This is not something you want to see in a World Championship final Chermen Valiev was huge favorite for the gold after beating the great Zaurbek Sidakov but then this happened in the final it was his own fault, the Japanese did nothing illegal, he had to give up the point to save his knee

it's always good for the sport to see new countries winning World titles with their own homegrown athletes. Georgios Kougioumtsidis was the star of the day, he became the first Greek to win a gold in men's freestyle World Championship. he was great for 2-3 years and finally won a world medal (and not just a medal, the gold medal) unfortunately for him his natural weight 79kg is not an Olympic weight so he has to move up or move down. Kyrgyzstan also had the chance for the first gold but their guy gave up a 7-0 lead against North Korea.