The better wrestler was never in question.
Four matches, four convincing victories and a gold medal for Walnut Creek’s Amit Elor at the Summer Olympics.
Elor finished her dominant run in Paris on Tuesday afternoon with a clean and easy 3-0 win over Kyrgyzstan’s Meerim Zhumanazarova, securing her first Olympic medal of what could be many to come.
At just 20 years old, Elor became the youngest American wrestler ever to win a gold medal, and just the third American woman to win gold since the women’s freestyle wrestling event was introduced at the Olympics in 2004.
In the gold medal match, Elor jumped ahead with a two-point takedown of Zhumanazarova, then added another point when Zhumanazarova was stalling on the ground.
The rest of the match saw the two wrestlers engaged in hand-fighting in which Elor was never going to be taken down. She stood on her feet nearly the entire match, forcing her opponent’s head to be looking straight to the ground while she was helplessly held still by Elor’s massive upper body.
When it was finished, Elor immediately got emotional.
“I just couldn’t believe I became an Olympic champion,” she said on the NBC broadcast. “This has been my dream for my entire life. I just can’t comprehend it. It’s hard to believe.”
For others, it’s easy to believe.
She went to College Park High in Pleasant Hill and wrestled for just one season as a freshman, going a perfect 36-0 while winning the state title in a match that lasted 20 seconds.
20-YEAR-OLD AMIT ELOR IS A WORLD CHAMPION.
She wins GOLD in women’s freestyle 68kg wrestling! #ParisOlympics pic.twitter.com/W6wm8SXB7X
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 6, 2024
The varsity coach, Arman Ostadsharif, said he knew then that Elor was going to be an Olympic champion, it was just a matter of time.
“It was practice for her,” her coach said. “She’s so kind she was never out there bullying people, making them feel bad for a second. She was just on a completely different level than all the girls in the state. She walked through the high school state tournament.”
Born on New Year’s Day 2004, she was one day too young to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, so she had to buy time over the last three years by winning multiple world titles.
In each of the last two seasons, Elor captured all three world titles in the U-20, U-23 and senior levels.
She was a heavy favorite in the Olympics, although she had to cut 9 pounds from her normal weight class to fight in the 150-pound weight class in Paris.
As soon as competition began on Monday, she looked convincing in every match.
She won all three of her matches on Day 1 while out-scoring her opponents 28-2.
Her final match was more of the same, as she never gave her opponent a second of control, dominating the full six minutes.
Ostadsharif said he took a break from work to watch Elor’s match on his laptop and began clapping and slamming his desk when he saw her score the match-winning points.
“It’s jaw-dropping to watch her wrestle,” he said. “It’s this weird duality of what she’s doing is amazing, but I’m not surprised at all.”
What makes Elor somewhat unique at this level is that she’s overpowering, but uses predominantly basic moves.
“What she’s doing isn’t easy because she’s always wrestling an interestingly fundamental style,” her coach said. “It doesn’t matter how much better she is than her opponents, she doesn’t wrestle flashy, she maintains solid, fundamental moves. She knows what works at a high level and does that at an extremely advanced and masterful level.”
When she was at College Park, she had “such a positive effect on the girls and boys in our room,” Ostadsharif said. “To see her finally fulfill that destiny that we all saw coming was special.”
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Elor had a challenging adolescent experience suffering a traumatic event when she was 14 and her 23-year-old brother, Oshry, was fatally shot at his home in Pleasant Hill during an attempt for marijuana robbery. Two years later, a Contra Costa County jury convicted both men, including a lifetime sentence for the gunman.
“For most anyone that would be a factor that halted a lot of peoples’ careers or derailed them,” Ostadsharif said. “The fact she was able to maintain composure going through that, what her family went through, that kind of trauma, is really amazing.”
After winning gold, Elor sprinted over to the corner of the arena where her family was waiting and blew them kisses.
“I’m sharing this medal with my entire family, my entire country, everybody I’ve ever met,” she said. “Becoming an Olympic champion is one of the most difficult things in the entire world and it’s hard to do it by yourself.”
