Spencer Lee and his potential path to Olympic Gold
Nearly five-and-a-half years ago Iowa heavyweight wrestler Sam Stoll posed this question to his much smaller teammate during a post-match press conference following the latter’s second NCAA title:
“Why are you the baddest man on the planet?”
At the time, the recipient of that head-turning question respectfully brushed the notion aside – to be revisited some other day, perhaps.
But starting tomorrow, he gets the chance to prove it true once and for all.
It’s the 2024 Paris Olympics. It’s Spencer Lee. And it’s time for the Hawkeye legend to take on the world.
All eyes on the now
Look, by now every single Iowa wrestling fan is well-versed in the trials and tribulations of (arguably) the program’s most famous, beloved athlete of all time.
Multiple ACL injuries, chases for collegiate/Olympic glory interrupted by global pandemic, countless dominant victories often overshadowed by the rarest of shocking upset defeats – you name it, Spencer Lee has pretty much been through it all in what remains one of the greatest NCAA careers in history.
To be honest, I even thought about constructing a narrative for this preview that would take readers from the very beginning of Lee’s story up until the latest chapter that’s about to be written.
My conclusion? Not only do versions of that story already exist – and excellent ones at that – but I strongly believe the subject at the center of it all would much rather the conversation focus on something else, just as he is right here and now.
“Excuses are for wusses” isn’t just a catchy soundbite. It reflects a lifestyle embodied by a select few who possess the ability to push themselves, their minds and bodies to places the rest of us mere mortals can’t even fathom.
So, even if Lee was compromised in some manner entering these Olympics, he’d hardly allow it to be a point of discussion regarding the goals he’d set for himself to attain.
But guess what? By all accounts not only does none of that matter, but none of it even exists right now as the Murrysville, Pennsylvania native gets set to go for gold.
Lee is as healthy as he’s been in nearly a decade – which should be a scary thought for anyone who takes the mat against him in Paris.
And so, just as I’m sure he would, the focus of this preview is on the now.
“I want to wrestle all of them.”
We’ve mentioned the body, now let’s dive into the mind.
If there’s a better summation of Lee’s mindset entering these Olympics than the one I’m about to share with you, I’ve yet to see it.
Across multiple interviews leading up to Paris he has expressed a similar, pointed sentiment – and perhaps no better than in this interview with FloWrestling a few weeks ago:
Said Lee, “I want to wrestle every single guy in that bracket that is a favorite. If someone says they could win I want to wrestle them…Now I’m only going to be able to wrestle five of them at most, but I’ll wrestle any of them any time anywhere…If there’s a tougher draw, give it to me. I want to wrestle all of them. I don’t care.”
Go ahead and call it ‘just talk’ if you’d like. That’s a fair enough opinion to have in the world of sports/soundbites in which we live.
I personally believe that Lee means every bit of what he said, and more importantly that it reflects a competitor who isn’t merely counting down the days until the biggest opportunity of his life arrives but is instead running towards it at full speed (even if only in his mind).
Why he can win
It isn’t a stretch to say that watching a single match of Lee’s is probably enough to put some version of the following thought into the minds of more than a few viewers:
“Is there anybody on this planet who’s better than that guy?”
Of course, for many others such a crude evaluation is hardly reason to believe he’s about to come out on top of a 16-man bracket chock full of the best wrestlers in the world.
In my article from earlier this week previewing that field of competitors I went so far as to lay out all the impressive credentials that will accompany athletes into this bracket who are not named Spencer Lee.
A pair of recent World Champions – one of whom also won Olympic silver at the 2016 Games – headlines the group, along with multiple World medalists and age-level champions aplenty.
The challenge will undoubtedly be steep.
Even so, what reason has Lee ever given observers to believe that he can’t meet and/or exceed the latest grand task set in front of him?
We’re talking about a 25-year-old whose last loss in a contested freestyle match was on May 31, 2015.
May 31, 2015.
Since that day, he’s 45-0 – including a 26-0 mark at Senior-level events (18 of which came via either tech. fall or pin).
Bemoan the sample size if you’d like – which is admittedly limited given the past injuries that have withheld Lee from testing himself more often on the Senior circuit (particularly internationally) – but amongst those victories are three that hold up against just about anything anyone else in his 57-kilogram bracket will be bringing to the table.
Back in 2019 at US Senior Nationals in Texas, Lee – wrestling on one torn ACL – thrashed current 61-kilogram World Champion Vito Arujau by a margin of 14-4.
Fast forward to the present day at the 2024 US Olympic Team Trials and he’d knock off another World Champion, this time 2021’s gold medalist at 57kg, Thomas Gilman.
Oh, and he’d do so not just once, but twice in-a-row to sweep their best-of-three finals series.
Gilman, a four-time World/Olympic medalist – incl. bronze at the Tokyo Games – also happens to know Lee better than any other top competitor at 57 kilograms given their previous history training together in the Iowa practice room before Gilman ultimately made the move to the Nittany Lion Wrestling Club in State College, PA.
If Gilman – coached by Cael Sanderson and company inside arguably the premier freestyle training environment in the world – couldn’t solve Lee despite getting two cracks at him, why would one expect the rest of the world to have markedly better ‘success’ doing so?
Schedule/TV information (August 8-9) *all times Central Daylight Time*
If you weren’t already aware, action will begin EARLY Thursday morning (August 8th).
As of now, ‘Session I’ is set for a 4:00 a.m. (CDT) start, with the 57-kilogram weight class for Men’s Freestyle – including Spencer Lee – getting underway 30 minutes later (4:30 a.m.).
An opening victory would advance Lee to the quarterfinals, which would commence roughly 80 minutes after that at 5:50 a.m.
Win again and the Hawkeye would have a break until the semifinals – set for 11:15 a.m.
In the (glorious) event that Lee should start his Olympic run 3-0 on Thursday he would then have more than 24 hours to gear up for the gold medal match, set for early Friday afternoon at 12:55 p.m.
However, in the unenviable scenario that he takes a loss on Thursday, Lee would need the opponent who beat him to reach the Olympic final in order to have a shot to wrestle back for bronze.
This system – known as ‘repechage’ – is the international wrestling version of consolations.
You can read a more in-depth explainer on repechage right here, but the bare bones of it is that all of the losers to one particular finalist (three in the case of the Olympics) wrestle a single-elimination ‘mini-bracket’ amongst themselves in order to determine a bronze medalist – while an identical situation plays out on the other half of the bracket.
(Two bronze medals are awarded in international wrestling.)
All repechage matches for Men’s Freestyle at 57 kilograms will take place on Friday (August 9th) – the first, at 4:00 a.m. between losers from Round 1 and the quarterfinals – and the second (for bronze), between the winner of that match and the semifinal loser from the day before.
(Bronze medal matches will go off immediately prior to the gold medal match.)
As for watching the action, the only place you can assuredly catch everything live is on Peacock.
There will likely be replays shown later each day on television (USA Network), but your best bet to see it all is Peacock – which I know may be frustrating to some.
But hey, we’ll all get through this together, OK?
(You can also find the full Olympic wrestling schedule here.)
The Draw
As of this morning the draw is finally out for 57 kilograms:
Lee received the equivalent of an 11-seed, though it’s important to note that all the unseeded wrestlers in the bracket were randomly drawn in – as well as the fact that the seeds don’t necessarily tell the whole story of who the top competitors are at each weight class.
(I’ll refer back to my earlier preview of the field again for those who want to learn more about how the seeding process works.)
His first-round opponent will be a familiar one, #6 Wanhao Zou of China.
Back at the ‘Last Chance’ Olympic qualifier in early May, Zou represented the only non-blowout victory of Lee’s 4-0 run in Istanbul.
A couple of powerful early shots put the Chinese wrestler ahead 6-1 in the first period before a dynamic takedown-to-turn sequence from Lee completely flipped things back in his favor (10-6) before the break.
From there, the action slowed significantly until the final 20 seconds when Zou would score a step out and a takedown to narrow the final deficit to one as time expired.
Lee has since referred to the match as a great ‘wakeup call’ – even in victory – and I think we’ll see a much sharper version of him in tomorrow’s rematch.
A win over Zou would set up a quarterfinal match with either #3 Meirambek Kartbay (Kazakhstan) or unseeded Bekzat Almaz Uulu (Kyrgyzstan).
Kartbay’s most notable achievements to date are a pair of appearances at the Senior World Championships in 2021 and 2023 – the latter of which saw him take 5th place (3-2).
Of interest to Iowa fans as to the Kazakhstani’s overall ‘ceiling’ at 57kg – those two defeats at 2023 Worlds were both 11-0 tech. falls at the hands of the #1 and #2 seeds in Paris this week.
Conversely, a matchup with Uulu would pit Lee against a fellow competitor making his Senior World/Olympic debut.
Uulu was a back-to-back U23 World bronze medalist at 57kg in 2022 and 2023.
A 2-0 start for the American would mean a semifinal appearance later Thursday morning.
The top seed on this half of the bracket – and thus, the favored opponent to make the semi – is #2 Arsen Harutyunyan (Armenia), a three-time Senior World bronze medalist (61kg in 2021-22 and 57kg in 2023) as well as a back-to-back U23 World champion (2021-22) up at 61kg.
Harutyunyan opens his tournament against a familiar NCAA name – Penn State’s two-time national champion at 133 pounds, Roman Bravo-Young (Mexico).
The other two wrestlers in the bottom-most ‘pod’ are #7 Gulomjon Abdullaev (Uzbekistan) and Aliabbas Rzazade (Azerbaijan).
Abdullaev took 7th at the Tokyo Olympic in 2021 with a 1-2 record that included an 11-1 loss to Thomas Gillman. He’d match that performance with two more 7th-place finishes on the Senior World stage in 2022 and 2023, going 2-2 on each occasion.
His first-round foe, Rzazade, counts a 2022 13th-place finish (1-1) as his best mark at a Senior World/Olympic tournament.
A 2021 U23 World champion, Rzazade also has some (ancient) history with Lee, getting demolished 10-0 in a semifinal bout between the two back at the 2016 U20 World Championships.
Look, it obviously won’t be an easy task to get by any of these seven opponents in a six-minute match. But if you’re asking my opinion, I feel pretty darn good about this draw for Spencer as opposed to some of the alternatives that were out there.
The Pick
So, who am I picking to stand atop the podium come Friday afternoon as the national anthem plays and another name is permanently etched into wrestling lore?
Without question, give me Spencer Lee.
Not because he’s American and not because he’s a Hawkeye – but because there are simply a few things in life that I’ll steadfastly believe in until the end of time:
I believe the central time zone is without a doubt the greatest time zone on earth. I believe pineapple absolutely belongs on pizza. And by God, I believe in Spencer Lee.
He has punctuated every step along his Olympic journey thus far in emphatic fashion – pinning Thomas Gilman to make Team USA and tech-ing his final ‘Last Chance’ qualifier opponent with ease to officially earn an Olympic berth.
I believe Lee will stamp his mark yet again in Paris, and in so doing ‘fulfill the prophecy’ that Sam Stoll foretold all those years ago by officially becoming “the baddest man on the planet” as an Olympic gold medalist.
You guys, it’s finally time…
LET’S DO THIS.
