What's Repechage?

As a fella in his 40’s, I find myself not wanting to go downtown as much, falling asleep on the couch before 10pm. and asking myself why everything isn’t simple. Repechage is one of those things that exists for some reason.

UWW for (almost all events) is single elimination for gold and silver plus repechage for bronze(s). For the world championships and Olympics there are two bronzes. To qualify for repechage for a bronze your loss must have been to one of the finalists. If you lose to someone not wrestling in gold medal match, you are eliminated.

I think everyone wonders why they do it this way and also not just add another match for one bronze instead of two. It very obviously creates lucky situations for medals as the bottom half and the top half of the brackets can be very lopsided. Wrestling often makes decisions against popularity, because things need to be “fair”. Repechage seems to be the opposite.

The explanation that makes any sense outside of saving time (which I still push back on because you can fix that especially with the small Olympic brackets) is it gives more countries medals. While Wrestling is arguably the most competitive global sport (when you seriously look at other Olympic sports they are typically dominated by one or two countries) it still has its powerhouses. Repechage definitely makes bronze medals more available to more countries. The counter point would be repechage can hurt those countries when they truly have someone who is a top competitor and they suffer a bad draw (see Adekuoroye (Nigeria) at the 2016 Olympics).

For now, it’s the system we have. The D1 NCAA Wrestling Championships is the best operated tournament in the world. UWW should try as much as they can to run something similar to it with sessions and have a better system than repechage. It truly doesn’t seem like the best system to use.