Amit Elor is Golden in Paris

PARIS, FRANCE (August 15, 2024) — Amit Elor dominated as advertised while marching through her four matches to the Paris Olympics gold medal podium in the 68kg freestyle wrestling division last week, becoming the youngest ever American wrestler of any gender or discipline to claim Olympic Gold.

The former College Park High wrestler has not lost a match since 2019 and even dropping down a weight class from 72 to 68 kilos (about nine pounds difference) for the Olympics didn’t impact her strength with four successive victories in Paris by a combined score of 31-2.

The 20-year-old Contra Costan was cheered on in Paris during her Aug. 5-6 matches by Team Elor with mom Elana as always, her biggest supporter along with her two brothers, cousins, nieces and nephews, coaches and trainer. Her beaming coach Sara McMann shared her 2004 Olympic silver medal with star pupil Elor in a photo after the match in front of the Eiffel Tower.

Elor was the first American wrestler to medal this year in Paris and the USA wrestling team followed with six more medals before the Games concluded last Sunday, including gold, silver and bronze performances by female teammates.

In her gold medal final match Elor scored three points in the opening period over Kyrgyzstan’s Meerim Zhumanazarova, the 2020 Olympic bronze medalist. Elor continued to press the rest of the match, which ended in her 3-0 victory.

Phenom

Although Elor won eight world championships between 2021 and 2023 she was unseeded in the Olympics at 68kg because she had not won any senior titles in that weight class. That meant she was drawn against Türkiye’s world champion Buse Cavusoglu Tosun in the opening match. Elor scored an easy 10-2 win over Tosun with many observers saying the 68kg world champ looked “paralyzed by fear of Elor.”

Her second match was an 8-0 shutout of Wiktoria Choluj of Poland in the quarterfinals. Her third match of the day was a 10-0 technical fall in the first period over Sol Gum Pak of North Korea in the semifinals.

As a College Park freshman in 2018-19 she was identified as a phenom as the Diablo Athletic League champion and going through all 36 matches undefeated. In the 150-pound weight class Elor pinned her nine North Coast Section and State Meet opponents, and her two championship matches ended in 15 and 20 seconds, respectively.

Elor has never lost a match on the senior level since her debut in the 2022 season. Her senior career record is 28-0 and she has amassed an 83-match win streak when considering all age group competition. Her last defeat was at the 2019 U17 World Championships in Sofia, Bulgaria, where she won a bronze medal and lost to Honaka Nakai of Japan in the semifinals 3-1.

Family

When she was just three or four years-old Amit Elor loved to tag along to her teenage siblings’ wrestling matches. Brother Orry competed for three years on the College Park wrestling team, placing eighth and third in the CIF State Meet as a heavyweight.

Orry Amit says his baby sister, the youngest of six children in the Walnut Creek family, “loved everything about wrestling. She would try to get on the wrestling mat to support me.” He recalls a female referee gave the young Amit a US Olympic singlet and she’s never looked back.

Her brother says Amit trained at the Community Youth Center starting as a four-year-old as her brothers Orry and Aviv and sister Ronny also trained there. He says Amit was one of the only female wrestlers in the program at the time, but that CYC now has a burgeoning girl’s program that is likely to blossom even more with the success of its most famous alumnus.

Ronny Elor, who was sorely missed in Paris due to travel issues, won an unofficial state championship for College Park before female high school wrestling was fully organized by CIF. “Ronny has been absolutely critical for Amit, making wrestling fun and traveling and coaching her to countless youth competitions. There is no way Amit would have continued wrestling through her youth if it were not for Ronny. She is an amazing rockstar, and a US national freestyle wrestling champion at the junior level,” brother Orry adds.

Training

After that all-winning freshman year at College Park, Elor’s club wrestling coach at the time discouraged her from continuing with high school folkstyle wrestling, fearing it would negatively impact her training for national and international freestyle competition.

Starting with her sophomore year she enrolled in the Mt. Diablo Unified School District Horizons independent study program and took courses at Diablo Valley College, which units counted three times those of high school. Effectively she had enough credits to graduate before she was officially a junior. This allowed her to spend more time training for a wrestling career that has taken off like a rocket.

Amit Elor is qualified to attend UC Berkeley and other universities but has not found a school with the requisite wrestling and academic program. Perhaps with NIL a school will come calling for an Olympic Gold Medalist and international sensation as well as outstanding student.