Amit Elor of Team United States (red) competes with Meerim Zhumanazarova of Team Kyrgyzstan (blue) during the Wrestling Women's Freestyle 68kg Gold Medal match on day eleven of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 at Champs-de-Mars Arena on Aug. 06, 2024 in Paris, France. (Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
The better wrestler was never in question.
Four matches, four convincing victories and a gold medal for Walnut Creek’s Amit Elor at the Summer Olympics.
Elor finished her dominant run in Paris on Tuesday afternoon with a clean and easy 3-0 win over Kyrgyzstan’s Meerim Zhumanazarova, securing her first Olympic medal of what could be many to come.
At just 20 years old, Elor became the youngest American wrestler ever to win a gold medal, and just the third American woman to win gold since the women’s freestyle wrestling event was introduced at the Olympics in 2004.
In the gold medal match, Elor jumped ahead with a two-point takedown of Zhumanazarova, then added another point when Zhumanazarova was stalling on the ground.
The rest of the match saw the two wrestlers engaged in hand-fighting in which Elor was never going to be taken down. She stood on her feet nearly the entire match, forcing her opponent’s head to be looking straight to the ground while she was helplessly held still by Elor’s massive upper body.
When it was finished, Elor immediately got emotional.
“I just couldn’t believe I became an Olympic champion,” she said on the NBC broadcast. “This has been my dream for my entire life. I just can’t comprehend it. It’s hard to believe.”
For others, it’s easy to believe.
She went to College Park High in Pleasant Hill and wrestled for just one season as a freshman, going a perfect 36-0 while winning the state title in a match that lasted 20 seconds.
20-YEAR-OLD AMIT ELOR IS A WORLD CHAMPION.
She wins GOLD in women's freestyle 68kg wrestling! #ParisOlympics pic.twitter.com/W6wm8SXB7X
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 6, 2024
The varsity coach, Arman Ostadsharif, said he knew then that Elor was going to be an Olympic champion, it was just a matter of time.
“It was practice for her,” her coach said. “She’s so kind she was never out there bullying people, making them feel bad for a second. She was just on a completely different level than all the girls in the state. She walked through the high school state tournament.”
Born on New Year’s Day 2004, she was one day too young to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, so she had to buy time over the last three years by winning multiple world titles.
In each of the last two seasons, Elor captured all three world titles in the U-20, U-23 and senior levels.
She was a heavy favorite in the Olympics, although she had to cut 9 pounds from her normal weight class to fight in the 150-pound weight class in Paris.
As soon as competition began on Monday, she looked convincing in every match.
She won all three of her matches on Day 1 while out-scoring her opponents 28-2.
Her final match was more of the same, as she never gave her opponent a second of control, dominating the full six minutes.
Ostadsharif said he took a break from work to watch Elor’s match on his laptop and began clapping and slamming his desk when he saw her score the match-winning points.
“It’s jaw-dropping to watch her wrestle,” he said. “It’s this weird duality of what she’s doing is amazing, but I’m not surprised at all.”
What makes Elor somewhat unique at this level is that she’s overpowering, but uses predominantly basic moves.
“What she’s doing isn’t easy because she’s always wrestling an interestingly fundamental style,” her coach said. “It doesn’t matter how much better she is than her opponents, she doesn’t wrestle flashy, she maintains solid, fundamental moves. She knows what works at a high level and does that at an extremely advanced and masterful level.”
When she was at College Park, she had “such a positive effect on the girls and boys in our room,” Ostadsharif said. “To see her finally fulfill that destiny that we all saw coming was special.”
Elor had a challenging adolescent experience suffering a traumatic event when she was 14 and her 23-year-old brother, Oshry, was fatally shot at his home in Pleasant Hill during an attempt for marijuana robbery. Two years later, a Contra Costa County jury convicted both men, including a lifetime sentence for the gunman.
“For most anyone that would be a factor that halted a lot of peoples’ careers or derailed them,” Ostadsharif said. “The fact she was able to maintain composure going through that, what her family went through, that kind of trauma, is really amazing.”
After winning gold, Elor sprinted over to the corner of the arena where her family was waiting and blew them kisses.
“I’m sharing this medal with my entire family, my entire country, everybody I’ve ever met,” she said. “Becoming an Olympic champion is one of the most difficult things in the entire world and it’s hard to do it by yourself.”
Water polo history in the making
In what could be the final Olympics of Maggie Steffens’ dominant water polo career, the Danville native hasn’t stopped scoring.
The Olympics all-time leader in goals, Steffens scored twice on Tuesday to lead Team USA to a nail-biting 5-4 win over Hungary in the quarterfinals in Paris.
The Americans, who are seeking a historic fourth consecutive gold medal in women’s water polo, fell behind 2-1 in the first quarter, with Steffens’ goal their only tally.
But the U.S. roared back in the second, when Temecula’s Tara Prentice scored and then Stanford’s Jewel Roemer added a go-ahead goal with 32 seconds left in the half.
Steffens added a power-play goal in the third to take a 3-2 lead, but Hungary knotted things up as the two sides went into the fourth quarter tied, 4-4.
Both teams played carefully in the final frame. Rachel Fattal finally gave the U.S. a lead with three minutes left.
From there, the Americans hung on, surviving a last-second possession from Hungary in which a hard shot sailed just over the crossbar.
Next up for Team USA: a semifinal match with Australia on Thursday. Spain and the Netherlands will face off in the other semifinal.
First Olympic kitesurfing event continues
Lafayette’s Daniela Moroz, a six-time world champion kitesurfer, completed her sixth race on Tuesday and is in third place with five races to go in the opening round.
The top two boats of the opening series progress to the final, while the remainder of the top-10 progress to the semifinal.
The surfers have five more races to be completed on Wednesday before the finals take place on Thursday.
Moroz, who learned to kitesurf in the choppy waters of Crissy Field, is seen as a favorite to reach the podium.
This is the first time kitesurfing is at the Olympics.
Santa Cruz climber off to a strong start
Natalia Grossman, a 22-year-old who began climbing in Santa Cruz at 6 years old, qualified for the finals in women’s climbing with a strong performance on Tuesday afternoon.
Grossman finished with 69.2 points, good for fifth out of 20 competitors. The top eight qualified for the finals, to take place on Thursday.
This is just the second Olympics with climbing as a sport.
Originally published at Jason Mastrodonato