Former College Park High athlete Amit Elor is headed to Paris on Olympic wrestling team
PLEASANT HILL, CA (May 17, 2024) — When she was just three or four years-old Amit Elor loved to tag along to her teenage brother Orry’s wrestling matches. He competed for three years on the College Park High wrestling team placing eighth and third in the CIF State Meet as a heavyweight.
Now 20, Amit Elor is the sensation of US wrestling, having swept through last month’s Olympic Trials at Penn State to grab the American team berth at 68 kilograms (150 pounds) and will be among the favorites for the gold medal in Paris when her event is contested on the first two days of wrestling Aug. 5-6.
Orry Amit says his baby sister, who is 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.
As a freshman at College Park in the 2018-19 school year she won all 36 of her matches and in the 150-pound weight class she pinned all nine of her North Coast Section and State Meet opponents with her two championship matches ending in 15 and 20 seconds, respectively. Her older sister Ronny had won an unofficial state championship for College Park about a decade earlier before female high school wrestling was fully sanctioned and organized by CIF.
Like a rocket
Amit 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 also 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.
Over these past few years Elor has been a sensation on the mat and is at the forefront of the women’s wrestling movement in America. She has won eight world titles since leaving College Park while principally training in New York.
Gold medals
In 2021 she was cadet and junior world champ. The following year she was junior, U23 and senior world champion and last year she repeated those three titles. While winning those gold medals Elor had a 29-0 record with 17 technical falls, seven pins and outscored her 29 opponents 251-9.
Winning back-to-back senior world championships, she is unbeaten in eight matches with a 60-6 point advantage, three technical falls, a pin and five shutouts.
Her mother Elana and brother Orry accompanied her to the Olympic Trials where she was top seed and defeated Forrest Molinari 6-0 and 2-1 to sweep the best-of-three series and secure her spot on the plane to Paris.
Elana Elor was at Kaiser Walnut Creek with her youngest daughter Monday talking to The Pioneer and added that the entire family will be in Paris this summer. Mother and daughter Amit were headed the next day to New York for a trip that included an appearance on Access Hollywood.
Omania falls short of Olympic team berth
One truism of Olympic Trails in individual sports is that there is only one winner and the rest of the places don’t seem to matter when just one athlete in an event or weight class is allowed to represent their county on the sport’s grandest stage.
Concord’s Peyton Omania was seeded second heading into the Greco Roman 67 kilos (147.7 pounds) weight class at the same Trials. His division was considered the most competitive of the six men’s Greco weight classes with three former Olympians plus Omania, who represented the country at the 2021 World Championships, in the field of 11 wrestlers.
The 24-year-old De La Salle wrestling legend was shocked by Javier Johnson with a pair of four-point moves in a 9-0 loss in the quarterfinals, ending the 2024 Olympic dream for the Concord man.
Jay Bedecarré
Jay Bedecarré is a long-time resident and writer in Concord and Clayton. He began his newspaper writing career while still a senior at Mt. Diablo High School and he has been part of The Pioneer since its inception in 2003. Jay also operates Bay Area Festivals, presenting events around the San Francisco Bay Area including Bay Area KidFest annually in Downtown Concord.