Olympic Wrestling 2012: Why Jake Varner Can Win Gold at 96kg Freestyle

Two-time NCAA wrestling champion Jake Varner will attempt to win gold for Team USA at the 96kg (211.5 lbs) weight class. He will succeed, and the reasons why are not difficult to understand.

Varner, an Iowa State alum, fell just shy of making the U.S. Olympic team for the 2008 Beijing Games as a sophomore in college, but now is one of the favorites at the London Games and the top-ranked 96kg American wrestler, according to TheMat.com.

Now a member of the Nittany Lion Wrestling Club at Penn State University, he has worked hard in preparation for these Olympics.

In an interview with Travis Johnson of the Centre Daily Times, Penn State’s wrestling coach echoed that, also offering a bit of a warning to those who face him in London:

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“I think he’s had some very good preparation,” Varner’s coach, Cael Sanderson, said. “He’s just a competitor. He wrestles at his best when he needs to and in the most critical moments. That’s one of the reasons he’s made the Olympics in the first place and has had as much success as he’s had. He’s going to give it his best shot every time he steps out on the mat. He does the same thing in practice. He’s definitely not somebody anybody’s going to want to see. He’s a bad draw, that’s for sure.”

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Sanderson, who won gold at the 2004 Athens Olympics at 84kg and is the only four-time undefeated NCAA champion, has been working with Varner since the Olympian was a freshman at Iowa State and says he can’t find any true weakness in the 26-year-old’s game.

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“He’s very difficult to score on. He does a great job of controlling tie-ups and scoring off the tie-ups, and he’s been developing some great shots. He’s got a world-class collar tie, and he has a lot of ways to score from there,” Sanderson said.

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The former gold medalist went on to say that Varner’s combination of speed, power and deceit is rare, that you never quite know when or from where he is coming. His weight class is not the deepest or most talented, so his array of different styles will be to his benefit.

Russia provided three consecutive Olympic champions at 96kg from the 2000 Sydney Games to the 2008 Beijing Games. They don’t have a dominant force competing in London, and that adds to Varner’s chances.

The Bakersfield, California native took bronze at the 2011 World Championships in Istanbul, Turkey, and the two men who stood above him on the podium—Iran’s Reza Yazdani (Gold) and Turkey’s Serhat Balci (Silver)—will be there and may pose as his biggest threat. Balci placed in a tie for fifth at the Beijing Games, but at 84kg.

The four medalists from Beijing were nowhere to be seen on the podium. Varner defeated 2008’s silver medalist, Kazakhstan’s Taimuraz Tigiev, to earn his bronze at the World’s, so it’s clear he can compete at the highest level.

The watered-down competition may be the biggest reason he can come away with a London gold medal, but don’t let that take away from the accomplishment.

Too often, the media and fans place an invisible asterisk by certain accomplishments. There is always a “but” involved.

He won the gold medal, but he didn’t face very good competition.

To win gold, he could have to defeat the men who placed above him at last year’s World Championship. That is more than enough to be worthy of recognition without an asterisk, no matter the level of talent they have.

His preparation with a former Olympic gold-medal winner, his bevy of ways to attack and the lack of domination from the 96kg weight class all will lead to Varner topping the podium Sunday at the medal ceremony.

It would be the first gold for the United States in a similar weight class since Kurt Angle won the 100kg class (heavyweight) at the 1996 Atlanta Games and Ed Banach won it at 90kg (light heavyweight) during the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

No American has won gold in either weight class on foreign soil since Benjamin Peterson (LH) did it at the 1972 München, Germany (Munich) Games.

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