PARIS — Amit Erol walked to the edge of the mat on Tuesday night, his mouth agape, his shoulders hunched, looking frustrated.
The moment she’d dreamed of her whole life had arrived. She didn’t know what to do. Should she wave to the crowd? Should she drop to the ground? Then her coach handed her an American flag and she began skipping around the mat.
“I still can’t believe it,” Errol said shortly afterward.
The 20-year-old may have been the only one surprised by her victory at the Champs de Mar arena, as she dominated her latest opponent in the 68 kg division at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Kyrgyzstan’s Merim Dzhumanazarova, just as she has dominated nearly every athlete who has stepped onto the mat over the past four-plus years.
Erroll’s 3-0 victory in the gold medal match marked her 41st consecutive win at the international level across all age groups dating back to 2019. With the win, Erroll became the youngest Olympic gold medalist in U.S. wrestling history and just the third American woman to win a gold medal, joining idols Helen Maroulis and Tamira Mensah-Stock.
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“She’s going to break all the records,” coach Sarah McMann said after the match. “I knew that even before she won her first senior championship.”
It will be hard for any Team USA player in any sport to dominate the way Errol did over the past two days. The Walnut Creek, Calif., native outscored her opponents 31-2 over her four matches. And in her first two matches, against reigning world champion Vuse Tosun of Turkey and Wiktoria Csorui of Poland, Errol scored the same total points (18) her opponents had scored against her since her most recent loss in 2019.
In total, Errol has won an Olympic gold medal and eight world championships in three different age divisions, including the senior, under-23 and under-20 titles the past two years.
“She feels almost unreal to us,” Errol’s mother, Elana, said earlier this summer. “She’s amazing.”
Elana Erol immigrated to the United States from Israel in the 1980s with Amit’s late father, Yair, who died suddenly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Elana remembers trying to get her youngest daughter to quit wrestling – a violent sport where she had to compete against boys – and to try dance, cheerleading, tennis, swimming – you name it, but it didn’t work. Amit started wrestling when she was 4 1/2 years old and has been wrestling ever since.
“It doesn’t feel real because things are happening one after the other,” Elana Errol said earlier this summer. “My daughter turned 4 yesterday and she said, ‘I want to wrestle,’ but I’m trying my best to convince her not to do it because it’s a boy’s sport.”
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Amit says she only wrestled with boys until she was 10. She often felt isolated and unwelcome alongside boys in the gym because, quite frankly, she was beating them up, which led some people to avoid wrestling her.
She said this week that she also had to deal with a “very tough” coaching staff that made her doubt her abilities on the mat.
“For many years I just thought I wasn’t good at wrestling,” Errol said, “I was always very negative about myself, even after all the success I had, so it took a lot of healing and a lot of support to get to the point where I believed in myself and my abilities and thought I was a good wrestler.”
And these days, “good wrestler” just isn’t enough to describe her.
Clarissa Chung, the 2008 Olympic bronze medalist and current head women’s wrestling coach at the University of Iowa, called her the “young GOAT” and said she’d be a sure thing for the Hall of Fame if she stayed healthy. McMann, who won a silver medal at the 2004 Summer Olympics, agreed.
“You watch her play and you see what she does against other players who are her equal in every way. She ruthlessly destroys every game plan,” McMann said. “It’s no secret what she does. She can play against anybody and not allow virtually a single point. That’s second to none.”
Herrol’s performance in Paris was all the more impressive considering she had to change her diet to compete. She normally competes in the 72kg weight class, but had to drop down a weight class at the Olympics because women’s wrestling is divided into six weight classes instead of the usual 10. The change forced her to lose about 10 pounds, a change she described as a “difficult process” over the past few months.
But at every weight, in every age group, Errol keeps winning. Since her narrow loss at the 2019 World Under-17 Championships, she has won nearly 20 points for every loss, which equates to two technical fall wins.
But all the while, Errol seems unaware that she has the upper hand. On Tuesday, as she looked out at the crowds waving Israeli flags in tribute to her roots, she wondered if all of this was real. How had it come to this?
“I guess I have a little bit of imposter syndrome,” Errol said, “I still feel like a kid who just started wrestling, but now I’m an Olympic champion.”
Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on social media @Tom_Schad.
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