Many of those who have paid the ultimate price for freedom have come through the wrestling ranks. We need to h... — Dan Gable

Many of those who have paid the ultimate price for freedom have come through the wrestling ranks. We need to honor them and win this decision to have wrestling - the world's oldest sport - remain a part of the most prestigious athletic competition in the world, the Olympics.

Author: Dan Gable

Insight: Wrestling has a strange kind of visibility problem. It's ancient, foundational, maybe even primal in how it strips away everything except two people and pure technique. Yet somehow it keeps getting threatened with removal from the Olympics, despite producing soldiers, athletes, and people shaped by discipline in ways most sports never touch. What Gable's pointing to runs deeper than nostalgia. There's something about wrestling culture—the grinding repetition, the weight classes that make pure technique matter as much as size, the way it demands absolute presence—that apparently builds a certain kind of person. The kind willing to sacrifice. That's not sentimental. It's observable. But here's what's easy to miss: we live in an era increasingly skeptical of difficult, unglamorous traditions. Everything gets optimized, monetized, turned into content. Wrestling resists that. It's ungainly on camera, requires real knowledge to appreciate, offers no shortcuts. So it gets squeezed out by sports with better PR. Honoring the people who've died defending freedom while simultaneously letting the training ground that shaped them disappear would be its own kind of carelessness—the disconnect between what we claim to value and what we actually protect.