Jordan Burroughs‘sequence of a decade at the top of wrestling in the United States, won in the Olympic tryouts.
Kyle Dake won the 2012 Olympic gold medalist and four-time world champion 3-0 and 3-2 in his best-of-three series to secure his place in the United States in Tokyo in the 74 kg freestyle division.
Burroughs has failed to qualify for the Olympics, having made all nine previous Olympic or world championship teams since the beginning of his senior career in 2011.
“It turns out that the race is over for me,” said Burroughs, 32, who before testing planned to continue fighting after 2021, he told NBCSN. “It is difficult. It will be difficult for a while.… The future is still bright for me, although it may not be in Tokyo.
“It isn’t over for me.”
In all, 15 fighters qualified for the Olympics in Fort Worth, Texas, on Saturday, in the men’s and women’s free and Greco-Roman modalities. Three more can win their places in a global qualification in May.
All other Olympic and world champions won their final series, including Rio’s gold medalists Helen Maroulis and Kyle Snyder, more Adeline Gray, the US record holder with five world titles.
MORE: Results of Olympic Fight Tests | Athletes qualified for the US Olympic team
Dake, two-time world champion with 79kg (non-Olympic weight), became the first American to eliminate Burroughs in a tryout. He came in with a 1-7 record against the legend.
He looked emphatically different in his first game. Dake gave Burroughs his first elimination in more than 200 senior-level matches and his first definitive loss to an American at the senior level. Burroughs’ previous four defeats to compatriots, including one to Dake in 2017, were via a tiebreaker.
Dake scored in the first 10 seconds of the second game, lifting and pushing him out of bounds. Burroughs tried his trademark double leg drop near the end of the first period, but failed to score. Dake scored two more in the first 35 seconds of the second period and stood his ground.
In the end, Dake put his arm around Burroughs, who was on his knees, patted Burroughs’ chest and spoke in his ear.
“I just thanked him, said I liked him,” said Dake. “It pushed me to levels I didn’t know I had inside me.”
Dake, 30, made his first Olympic team, eight years after completing an unprecedented career at Cornell. He is the only man to win NCAA titles in four different weight classes.
Since then, he lost to Burroughs in the world championship tryouts in 2013, 2015 and 2017. In 2016, he left the 74kg division of Burroughs and moved to 86kg, partly because Burroughs had a goodbye in the tryouts final.
Dake, after losing the 86 kg finals in the 2016 Olympic tryouts for the eventual bronze medalist J’den Cox, went down to 79kg to win the last two world championships (while Burroughs took the 74kg bronze in the last two worlds). Dake then went down to challenge Burroughs at the Olympic tryouts.
All of Saturday’s final 18 series, except two, were sweeps.
At the end of the night, Maroulis defeated Jenna Burkert in 22 seconds in the rubber match of his 57kg series. It ended with tears from both athletes.
Maroulis, after becoming the first American woman to win an Olympic wrestling title in 2016, retired briefly in 2019 over a two-year period, where she suffered concussions and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“It was very difficult to separate my emotions at this tournament,” she said. “That’s why I fought so hard.”
Maroulis later revealed that he had ripped an MCL two and a half weeks earlier.
Burkert competed a week after his mother died after complications from open heart surgery. After the loss, she said, “I’m sorry, mom,” on the mat.
“A broken heart again,” said Burkert later. “I know that my mother didn’t care about victories and defeats, but I just wanted to honor her with a victory.
“I don’t regret my loss. I’m sorry for the headache my mother went through. “
Maroulis is one of five women on the six-woman Olympic team that has a medal in the world championship. None has more than Gray, who broke up with the 17-year-old Kylie Welker in less than two minutes of the six allocated in both 76kg matches.
Gray goes to his second Olympics after shockingly losing his medals in Rio. She was upset in the quarterfinals of 2016, breaking a two-year winning streak.
“It was a disappointment not to go around and go out with a gold medal,” she said. “I really feel like I am the most dominant person and the best in the weight category.”
Gray revealed six months after the Olympics that he struggled in Brazil with a shoulder injury. She underwent surgery on that shoulder and to repair a broken meniscus in her knee in January 2017 and spent 11 months between games, losing that year’s world championship and also marrying the U.S. Army captain. Damaris Sanders.
Gray wasn’t sure about the return, but he racked up a record 44-1 in matches he played between 2018 and 2020, according to freestylewrestling.org.
ABOUT YOUR TURF: A look at the United States Olympic women’s wrestling team
Snyder, who in Rio became the youngest US Olympic champion in history at 20, facilitated the work of former Ohio State teammate Kollin Moore to make the team with 97kg. Earlier in the week, a clash was expected between Snyder and the 92kg two-time world champion J’den Cox, but Cox lost weight before Friday’s first rounds.
Snyder may have another epic in Tokyo with his main international rival, the Russian Abdulrashid Sadulayev, arguably the best weight-for-weight fighter in the world.
The other major US medal prospects are led by Tamyra Mensah-Stock, who also won the 2016 Olympic tryouts, but failed in three attempts to qualify for the US seat to Rio in international tournaments. Mensah-Stock won the 2019 world title again at 68kg, beating the Japanese with the Rio gold medal.
“It will take too long,” she said. “I wanted to go back and prove to myself and everyone that I can become an Olympic athlete.”
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