There is no doubt that what Abdulrashid Sadulaev has already done at the age of 25 solidifies him as the best in the world. At this point of his career where does he fall amongst all time freestyle wrestlers?
The first argument that many people in the world have is who is the greatest freestyle wrestler at the moment. This debate falls between two guys who are Aleksandr Medved who is a 3x Olympic Champion and the pioneer of freestyle wrestling. The other guy is Buvaisar Saitiev who wrestled more recently and also won 3x Olympic golds.
Americans tend to view Saitiev as the greatest and a majority of the world tends to view Medved as the greatest. Sadulaev in a recent interview said his goal is to tie or pass Medved as the greatest to for this arguments sake we will go with Medved as the guy to pass.
Medved was arguably the pioneer of wrestling being that he is the only real wrestler that was from the 60-70s that is still talked about today. There are very few wrestlers that wrestled before 2000 that people even acknowledge. These would include Alexandr Karelin, Arsen Fadzaev, Sergei Beloglazov, and a handful of others.
Saitiev was essentially perfect in his career, that was when he actually medaled. There were a good amount of blemishes in his career that nobody talks about because they just forgot about it. There were a decent amount of times he did not make the team and times he just did not medal. This is going to hurt his case a lot in a year or two which is when I think Sadulaev passes him.
Now let us get into what Sadulaev needs to do to be the GOAT of freestyle wrestling. He needs to win out to Paris thats it, anything he does beyond that is just bonus points and he is on the way to becoming the all time goat. If he wins out to Paris that would make him a 7x world champion and 3x olympic champion. and that would be at only 28 years old. If he wants to and his body lets him there is no doubt he could go till Los Angeles 2028. If he can pull that off which is going to be a lot easier said than done in my opinion he is the goat, no contest.
Where do you think Sadulaev stands, and where do you think he will end up?
