The most dominant female athlete in America won Olympic gold — in wrestling

PARIS - The match over, the gold medal secured, Amit Elor threw her hands up to her mouth in astonishment, as if she couldn’t believe she just had become an Olympic champion. It was a reaction shared by exactly no one Tuesday night at Champs-de-Mars Arena. Even her opponent in the 68-kilogram freestyle wrestling final seemed so sure of Elor’s superiority, she spent almost the entire match in a defensive crouch, hoping to stave off the inevitable.

It didn’t work. Elor, 20, prevailed over Kyrgyzstan’s Meerim Zhumanazarova, 3-0, to complete an overpowering march through her weight class at the Paris Olympics, making her the youngest Olympic champion in American wrestling history. In her four matches, she outpointed her opponents by an aggregate score of 31-2, smothering one opponent’s head into the floor, leaving another in tears and mercy-ruling her semifinal opponent.

“I’m surprised anyone scored on her at all,” said Elor’s coach, Sara McMann.

And if Elor’s roughshod run through this tournament sounds impressive, zoom out further and look at what she has done over the past five undefeated years. Since her last loss in 2019, she has won eight world championships in both age-group and senior-level competitions, gone 41-0 in international competition and outscored opponents by a combined score of 353-8.

The most dominant female athlete in America may not be the one who wins distance freestyle swims by tens of seconds or who performs flipping, twisting dismounts that are named for her. Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles are sometimes beaten.

The most dominant female athlete in America is the one who gets up under your clavicle, flips you on your back and makes you question your life choices, the one who goes around the world whupping international butt, over and over and over, from Belgrade to Buenos Aires. The one who never loses yet somehow seems astonished every time she wins.

“I’m still in disbelief,” Elor said minutes after her gold medal win. “I think I have a little bit of impostor syndrome, because I still feel like that little kid who just started wrestling. But I just became an Olympic champion.”

For the rest of the sport, Elor’s victory Tuesday night had that unmistakable feeling that accompanies the triumphant arrival of a generational talent on their sport’s biggest stage - when the hype meets the moment, and the moment exceeds the hype.

Three matches before Elor’s, with IOC President Thomas Bach on hand to bear witness, 41-year-old Mijain Lopez, the Cuban heavyweight legend nicknamed “El Terrible,” won his championship match to become the first Olympic athlete in history to win five consecutive gold medals in the same individual event. He then dramatically sat down, removed his shoes, left them on the mat - the traditional wrestling retirement gesture - and walked off to a standing ovation.

It’s not a huge stretch to suggest the end of the Lopez era and the start of the Elor era may have arrived on the same day.

For Elor, this was almost destined to be the moment she arrived. She was born to Israeli-immigrant parents on New Year’s Day 2004, the same year women’s wrestling debuted on the Olympic program. Had she arrived one day earlier, she would have been eligible for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, instead of missing the age cutoff by a day. At 17, she might have been too young and too raw to make much of a mark. At 20, with multiple world championships under her belt, she came to Paris as a genuine phenom.

The youngest of six children raised in Walnut Creek., Calif., she had been drawn to wrestling at the age of four after accompanying her brothers to their practices. Because there were few girls programs in those days, Elor spent most of her childhood wrestling boys, hearing more than once from coaches and officials, “Go easy on those boys.”

At age 12, she won a boys’ national folklore wrestling championship in Cedar Falls, Iowa. A picture from that tournament shows her on the top step of the podium at the medal ceremony, with a sulking, sad-faced boy, whom she had just vanquished in the championship match, still towering over her — from the step below.

Before long, she was an international teenage sensation. When she lost a match at the under-17 world championships in 2019, she told reporters, “I’ll get it next year.” She hasn’t lost another match since.

But even as Elor was compiling a remarkable record of international dominance on the mat, she was dealing with unimaginable tragedy off it. Older brother Oshry was killed in a home invasion in 2018. Father Yair died in 2022 at the age of 64; family members suspect COVID killed him. The war in Gaza brought on waves of complex emotions connected to her parents’ homeland and the place where she spent many summers training as a wrestler.

“I heard last night that almost the whole country (of Israel) was watching me and that it was on all the news networks, and I just can’t believe all the love I’ve received,” she said. “I’ve always felt that to be a huge part of my identity, but especially after the tragedy on Oct. 7, it’s been horrifying, and I feel like it’s (revealed) a new element of my identity … I really hope that I can bring even just an ounce of joy to the people right now.”

While some Olympic wrestlers eventually gravitate to the money and glamour of the pro game — her coach, McMann, won an Olympic silver in 2004, then went on to have a long career in mixed martial arts — Elor sounds as if she could be an Olympic lifer, maybe even one who comes back every four years until it’s time to leave her shoes in the ring.

“Other than becoming an Olympic champion, my biggest dream of all time is to go to the 2028 Olympics because I am from California,” she said. “I’ve been excited for that ever since I heard about it.”

Elor seemed like she could have gone on forever talking about her journey, but soon she was whisked away from the media mixed zone. “We have a medal ceremony to go to,” she was told.

In a dimly lit corner of a makeshift tent maybe 100 yards from the arena, USA Wrestling executive director Rich Bender held his iPhone up to Elor’s face so she could check her look. She redid the ponytail holding up her strawberry blonde hair, smoothed out her eyebrows and eyelashes. The welts that covered her face, a wrestler’s signature, would have to stay.

Someone came and took off her wrestling shoes and replaced them with some expensive looking sneakers. The wrestling shoes went into a duffel bag. They weren’t going anywhere near the center of the mat.