Spencer Lee earns ticket to Paris Olympics
The word ‘deserve’ can be a tricky one in both life and sports.
I’d argue that lots of people in this world deserve things like happiness and good health based upon the lives that they lead.
But the thing is, life (much like sports) doesn’t always seem to care about what you might deserve, does it?
Poor luck here, a bad bounce there; you can do seemingly everything ‘right’ and there’s still no guarantee you’ll reap the rewards for your otherwise admirable efforts and dedication.
When I think of Spencer Lee, I think of a wrestler and a human being who probably deserves success as much as anyone. His preternatural talent, maniacal work ethic and generosity/professionalism toward seemingly everyone within his orbit check pretty much every conceivable box one could want in an elite athlete striving to achieve at the very highest of levels.
Unfortunately, if there’s any sport that doesn’t give a damn about what you deserve it’s wrestling.
And so, the only way to reach those heights and attain those ultimate goals is – in the words of Tom and Terry Brands – to go out and earn it instead, not because you’re any more deserving of success than anyone else, but because you refuse to be denied regardless of the obstacles fairly/unfairly placed in front of you.
Spencer Lee has had more than his share of adversity in the sport of wrestling, leaving many to question whether he’d ever fulfill the promise that we’ve seen in him ever since he ran roughshod through back-to-back-to-back age-level World titles from 2014-16 in a manner of dominance rarely seen before (or since).
You all know his college story after he decided to become a Hawkeye – one mostly littered with unfathomable dominance, but always tinged by ‘what if’s’ stemming from constant injury battles and the rare defeats that he did suffer.
Through no real fault of his own, the rest of the wrestling world has judged and critiqued his every move like few others.
So, yeah, achieving his ultimate goal in the sport – an Olympic gold medal – would be a nice way to shut those people up. But more than anything else, it would signify that he refused to be defined by the hardships standing in his way.
Everything about the person/athlete that is Spencer Lee might well have been incredibly deserving of the berth at the 2024 Paris Olympics that he now has firmly in his grasp after a 4-0 performance at the World Olympic Qualifier, but that isn’t what made it transpire.
He did. He earned it.
How it happened
Look, I’ve got a tendency to go into a lot of detail when it comes to the match-by-match breakdowns of past/present/future Iowa Hawkeyes – especially across a monumental tournament like this weekend’s.
I enjoy it, and hope readers find it to be informative/entertaining too.
Thankfully, for those whose favorite thing it is not – and perhaps for the long-term benefit of my typing fingers – Spencer Lee tends to render that particular exercise far less necessary.
Instead, he works so ruthlessly that it winds up being possible to fit his entire tournament run into one tidy 11-minute clip, so those who may have missed the action can well and truly see exactly what happened.
I detailed in my preview for the qualifier that all things considered I believed Spencer to have gotten a relatively good draw on his half of the bracket if things played out as expected.
Well, they more or less did, sans his fourth and final match of the tournament.
Lee’s opening bout with Ben Tarik (Morocco) lasted all of 23 seconds, as a hard snap down, a go-behind and four tight leg laces ended the match before either coach could settle into their respective corner.
His second match would be a stark contrast to not only his first, but as it turns out, to pretty much every single other moment he spent on the mat in Istanbul, Turkey.
Top-seeded Wanhao Zou (China) opened the scoring in this one off an early reattack. Then, with the margin at 1-2 he snagged a single leg and nearly sent Lee off the elevated mat/stage altogether for a four-point takedown and a 1-6 lead.
With less than a minute remaining in the opening period the Hawkeye alum would respond in major fashion, scoring off a low-level shot and immediately transitioning into a trio of laces – causing Zou to take injury time and a newfound four-point deficit (10-6) into the break.
From there, the next 2.5-plus minutes were largely defined by a lack of action and any committed attacks as Lee seemed fairly content with maintaining his lead and Zou (strangely) going along with it.
Finally, Zou opened up, scoring a step out with 18 seconds left and a takedown almost immediately thereafter – which, for a moment, seemed to put Lee (now ahead by just one) in jeopardy of giving up a match-winning turn.
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But the Pennsylvania native remained calm in the bottom position with short time left, fending off Zou’s attempts to secure the 10-9 win.
Funnily enough, it was after this moment – and while observing Lee’s seeming disgust with the closer-than-necessary victory over a back-to-back top 10 finisher at the Senior World Championships – that I thought to myself the rest of field was in serious trouble.
Despite the concerns some continue to have over Lee’s ability to keep scoring in the latter stages of a match (which he recently disproved in a pair of huge bouts against Thomas Gilman, BTW), my observation of this one was that he simply took his foot off the pedal, not that he was physically incapable of generating more offense in the second period.
And for those of you who have watched Spencer compete for a long time, what tends to be the response after a match in which he’s disappointed in his performance (even in a win)?
The answer? Absolute destruction.
Wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what would happen this go around too.
A quarterfinal against Macedonia’s Vladimir Egorov, who finished in eighth place back at the 2021 Senior World Championships and was a 2022 European champion, had the audacity to threaten to last an entire minute, but to no avail.
A quick takedown by Spencer led to a pair of exposures using his signature wrist tilt, and even after Egorov broke the hold to score a two-point exposure of his own Lee would immediately regain the advantage, getting back on top and locking up yet another leg lace to ice things in a 12-2 technical superiority win.
From there, all that was left to do to punch a ticket to Paris was to emerge victorious from a match with somewhat of a surprise semifinalist – Rakhat Kalzhan of Kazakhstan.
A 25-year-old whose credentials included a 14th-place finish at the 2022 Senior World Championships and back-to-back medals at the Senior Asian Championships (silver in 2022, bronze in 2023), Kalzhan entered the winner-goes-to-Paris bout fresh off defeating Iran’s 2021 World silver medalist Alireza Sarlak (7-2).
Impressive recent form for the Kazakhstani aside, Spencer Lee either didn’t care or it simply didn’t matter – as he put the pièce de resistance on his tournament run with a swift and comprehensive thrashing of Kalzhan to earn his spot at the Paris Games.
Finally, after all the expectations, all the success and all the adversity, his Olympic dream was realized – at least part of it anyway.
Lee’s 4-0 record in Istanbul made him the 20th Olympian in Hawkeye wrestling history, and the third-consecutive 57-kilogram representative for Team USA that once donned the iconic Iowa singlet, including 2021 bronze medalist Thomas Gilman and 2016’s Dan Dennis – the latter of whom now coaches with the Hawkeye Wrestling Club and was in Lee’s corner this weekend.
But knowing Lee, even making a prestigious team such as he now has is simply not enough.
His dream has never been to ‘merely’ become an Olympian, it’s to come home with a gold medal around his neck – just as his former college coach Tom Brands did back in 1996, and just as four other Hawkeyes had done before him (Terry McCann in 1960 and Randy Lewis plus Ed and Lou Banach in 1984).
Listen to Lee’s post-tournament interview with USA Wrestling and that mindset becomes all the more clear.
Or, perhaps even more illustrative of his singular focus is the fact that 10-15 minutes after his final match while posing for photographs with his ‘ticket’ to Paris in hand, Lee still had his Black & Gold mouthguard firmly between his gums as though not only had Olympic preparation already begun, but as if it had never really stopped at all, and maybe hasn’t ever since he was a little kid who dreamed to make all of this happen in the first place.
Whatever the case, in a little over two months the 15 other competitors in his bracket had better watch out – because the Spencer Lee we saw today (and the one many have always believed in) appears more than ready to take on the very best that the world has to offer.
And I can’t wait to watch it happen.
