Isegoria

I thought it was bad enough that the modern Olympics lacked pankration, but now wrestling has been dropped by the International Olympic Committee:

Freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling will be contested at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, but they will be excluded from the 2020 Summer Games, for which a host city has not yet been named, the I.O.C. said Tuesday.

The decision to drop wrestling was made by secret ballot by the Olympic committee’s 15-member executive board at its headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. The exact vote and reasons for the decision were not given in detail.

[...]

Sports like snowboarding have been added to the Winter Games to broaden the audience. Golf and rugby will be added to the 2016 Rio Games. Among the sports that wrestling must compete with for future inclusion are climbing, rollerblading and wakeboarding.

The I.O.C. may have also grown frustrated that Greco-Roman wrestling did not include women, experts said. Women began participating in freestyle wrestling at the 2004 Athens Games.

Politics also play an inevitable role in the workings of the I.O.C. Among the sports surviving Tuesday’s vote was modern pentathlon, also threatened and less popular internationally than wrestling. But modern pentathlon, a five-event sport that includes shooting, horseback riding and running, was invented by Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Games. And it is supported by Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., son of the former Olympic Committee president and a member of its board.

Wrestling was the final event of the ancient pentathlon, which comprised the long jump, javelin throw, discus throw, stadion (~200-meter) sprint, and wrestling.

Jack Slack analyzes Jon “Bones” Jones’ spinning elbows:

Jon Jones doesn’t throw the spinning elbow at random for the simple reason that it is difficult to land correctly and if the opponent is stepping in towards him it pretty much gifts the opponent Jones’ back. An excellent example of this came in the first round of Jones’ bout with Mauricio Rua as the latter was lumbering towards Jones. Jones threw the spinning elbow as Rua plodded forward but missed and gave the injured Brazilian back control. Fortunately Rua’s wrestling was not a huge threat to Jones, and instead the champion attempted to drop for a heel hook, giving Jones top position. Notice below how Jones’ elbow flies past Rua’s head and Jones’ shoulder is the only point that contacts Rua with a soft thud.

The actual striking surface on a spinning back elbow is actually remarkably small, unlike Jones’ elbows from guard in which if he misses with his elbow the rigid bone of his forearm still does ample damage, if Jones misses the spinning elbow he only connects with the triceps or shoulder. When this is the case very little damage is done for such a high risk manoeuvre. For all the talk of how Jones’ enormous reach allows him to take risks without fear of repercussions, Jon Jones’ spinning back elbow essentially gives his opponent’s their only chance to get in range when he fails to land it correctly and he still uses it in most of his fights.

The variation with which we are now all most familiar is Jones’ spinning elbow along the fence. This has proven to be the most reliable scenario from which Jones can place himself in position to spin as safely as possible and line up his target to connect with the point of his elbow. Below is the standard Jon Jones set up for his spinning back elbow.

Notice that Jones has Rua pressed against the fence with his head to the left and keeps control of Rua’s right elbow. Every time Jones clinches an opponent along the fence, he frees one arm so that he can spin while using his other hand to drive the opponents head back from underneath their chin. If an opponent holds an overhook or an underhook on either of Jones’ arms he is not free to spin — consequently this technique doesn’t mesh as well with Jones’ takedown game as it appears. If both of Jones’ hands are free and he is still pushing his opponent into the fence, a spinning elbow is pretty much assured.

You will also notice the unique position Jones has to assume before he spins — Jones brings his right leg across in front of himself. In every spinning or turning technique, finding ways to shorten the spin by bringing your pivot leg across yourself while distracting your opponent is vital to improving the likelihood of success. Jones’ use of the clinch — a position in which he is famed for his wrestling — to conceal the preliminary movements or his turning strikes is a wonderful strategic turn and shows that Jones is willing to give up the prospect of a takedown to inflict one shot damage.

There’s much more.

Despite the high injury rate in MMA training, the UFC has never had to cancel an event — until now. Dan Henderson injured his knee, and Jon Jones refused a match with legendary smack-talker Chael Sonnen.

Jack Stack explains why Jones was wrong to turn down that match-up:

This should be obvious to almost everyone: Chael Sonnen is not a light heavyweight, not a striker, and not likely to be able to give Jon Jones any trouble on the feet. This is clearly a hilarious mismatch and it’s actually understandable that Jones would not want anything to do with this fight when it could lower his credibility immediately after signing with Nike. No-one wants to fight enormous mismatches when they are supposed to be proving that they are the best fighter in the world.

On the other hand, this match was an absolute gift in terms of publicity. Chael Sonnen has proven one thing over the last three years; that he can talk up a fight which on paper is an enormous mismatch. No-one rated him as having a chance at Anderson Silva in their first bout, in fact many were disappointed at yet another mediocre middleweight title match being put together, but the amount of smack talking Sonnen did made people pay attention. It was the same with the rematch – Sonnen had lost the first bout with Silva the exact same way he had lost almost every other bout in his career but he still managed to make people pay to see the rematch.

It is interesting that Sonnen began his smack talk campaign against Jon Jones just days before his former team mate and friend, Dan Henderson dropped out of UFC 151. It is certainly worth considering that at least Sonnen knew about Henderson’s inability to compete long before Jones did. In that respect I can understand where Jones is coming from, he could feel like he has been set up to have his opponent switched at the last minute.

What it all comes down to, however, is that almost two dozen fighters on this card have made huge sacrifices, many of them living fight to fight on tight cash, for a card that is now cancelled. Jon Jones directly affected their livelihood and the lives of their families and children by refusing to fight a 185lbs wrestler. It’s understandable that Jones wouldn’t want to risk losing to a middleweight, but that’s exactly what he was risking against Dan Henderson. Jon Jones trained a full camp for a 185lbs wrestler with a huge right hand, and he was asked to fight a 185lbs wrestler with little striking skill or punching power to speak of. When you boil it down to those facts, it’s hard to side with Jon Jones.

Lyoto Machida has turned down a rematch with Jon Jones at UFC 152 on September 22 — but the fact that he was scheduled to take that fight is puzzling:

It bewildered me that Lyoto Machida would take a rematch with so much to work on in his game at such short notice. Lyoto Machida was stopped pretty emphatically by Jon Jones in their last meeting due to Jones’ better wrestling and, more importantly, due to Jones exploiting holes that have always existed in Lyoto Machida’s striking game. The error that Jones exploited in Machida’s striking is not something that can be changed overnight, it is something that Machida has had trained into him since infancy under the karate tutelage of his father.

[...]

Machida comes from a karate background, and that is what gives him the confidence to back up for a round and a half and then dive in with a counter as soon as the opponent over commits. Machida uses the same counter every time – a straight with whichever hand is his rear hand (he switches stance often).The difference is that Machida’s karate technique is not good boxing technique.

When the reverse punch is thrown in karate, the non-punching hand is drawn back to the hip in what is called hiki-te. This represents the act of grabbing an assailant’s clothing and serves no functional purpose in MMA.

In boxing the non-punching hand is drawn back to the chin or to above the eyebrow, to deflect an opponent’s punches should he fire back.

Machida can get away with pulling his passive hand back to his hip when he is southpaw and his opponent is orthodox due to his head moving outside of their lead hand and being safe from the left hook. What Jones did was to switch to the same stance as Machida, fake a kick to cause Machida to counter, and then connect a rear hook on the side that Machida drops his hand. This was also not a one off event in the fight — Jones hit Machida with a hard rear hook on the jaw in the first part of the second round — showing just how open Machida is to this punch.

[...]

Clearly Lyoto has been working consciously on making sure his non-punching hand is in position to block Jones’ attempts to counter, but this was just a month ago and he still got clipped by Ryan Bader who is an inaccurate striker for the most part. To take a fight next month with Jon Jones would simply be lunacy when Machida has so much specific work to do on his style and gameplan. Lyoto has the tools to defeat Jon Jones, he demonstrated that in the much referred to first round of their bout, but to rush a title shot would be throwing away what could be his last chance at the light heavyweight crown.

Josh Rosenblatt explains how Fedor Emelianenko made him love MMA:

A few years ago I read an article in ESPN magazine about back-alley bareknuckle-boxing king-turned-prizefighter Kimbo Slice. Despite a lifelong aversion to violence, I was curious about the YouTube streetfights that had made Slice so famous, and after watching him pound down a rag-tag assortment of street toughs I decided (as I’m sure many did) that he must be the toughest man in the world, impervious to pain and impossible to defeat.

Then I went back to reading the ESPN profile and learned that a lot of professional MMA fighters thought Slice was a joke who wouldn’t last two minutes in a real fighting ring. I couldn’t even begin to imagine a world where that was possible, not after what I had witnessed. So I once again set my squeamishness aside and starting watching any MMA videos I could find.

It didn’t take long before I stumbled upon footage of a stone-faced Russian Everyman who, in fight after fight, did away with his opponents with a bizarre calm. This man didn’t live up to any of my preconceived notions about cage-fighters. He had no tattoos. He didn’t seem to relish causing pain. He didn’t brag, he didn’t boast, he barely even seemed to speak. He appeared to be entirely free of muscles, his body covered in a thick layer of flab. After beating former UFC champion Mark Coleman’s face into a bloody mess, he cheerfully patted Coleman’s small children on the head, as if to assure them that he wasn’t a monster but an avuncular figure in tight shorts. I read stories about this quiet family man from a frozen town somewhere in rural Russia who trained by dragging anvils around the forest and spending hours purging himself in a ramshackle homemade bathhouse, and who sought religious guidance from a Russian Orthodox priest who looked like a character from a Dostoyevsky novel. And I became fascinated by his fights.

That sounds a lot like how Royce Gracie made people love NHB.

Jack Slack has produced a thorough analysis of how to beat Anderson Silva:

Something which should have become apparent in Anderson Silva’s fights with Demian Maia, Patrick Cote and Thales Leites is that Silva is almost completely averse to leading. Leading, in striking terms, is to attack first, and it is something which Anderson Silva very rarely does with the actual intention of hurting his opponent. Most of Anderson’s leads are simply intended to draw an attack from the opponent which he can counter without worrying about being taken down.

The reasons for this are two-fold: Silva does his best work on the counter, and Silva’s early career was plagued by being taken down off of his offense. Daiju Takase took Silva down as Silva lunged at him with a jab, as did Tetsuji Kato. In fact much of Anderson Silva’s earlier career was spent on the offensive, backing opponents into corners and winging punches at them, attempting to physically stuff their shots as they dived under his punches. It was a very hit and miss game, and is completely alien when watched next to the Anderson Silva of today.

Notice here, against Tetsuji Kato, Anderson is trying to implement a traditional sprawl and brawl strategy, rather than his modern, movement based one. In the octagon, Anderson has been able to develop a style in which he can simply move backward and try to draw his opponent’s strikes. In the ring and during his pre-UFC career, the traditional mindset was that strikers should go foward, cut off the ring, attack, and try to sprawl on the opponent. Wanderlei Silva and Cro Cop were enormously strong and able to pummel for underhooks on anyone. Anderson, a much less stocky fighter, struggled with this. Notice how he throws a body kick from far too close, which Kato simply smothers and takes him down off of.

Improvements in wrestling skill did not alleviate this problem, improvements in strategy did. Silva very rarely leads with commited strikes today. Anderson’s sprawl looks excellent when he is defending a wild shot, but he is not a great sprawler while on offense. You will notice that when Silva’s opponents do not lead, he tends to stick to long, showy strikes that cause little physical damage but win him points with the hope that this will force the opponent to come forward later in the fight. He will very rarely step in with power strikes against an opponent who has not acted first. Some of Anderson’s signature leads are the long jab, the thrust kick to the knee and the spinning back kick. All very long techniques which are hard for the opponent to score the takedown off of.

The top two frames show Anderson’s modern kicking game against competent grapplers — focusing on the calf. A kick on the thigh can be caught or forced to ride up the leg into the hand of the opponent, Anderson does this himself (most notably against James Irvin), but a kick on the calf is almost impossible to catch. Also the distance between the two fighters is much greater — giving Silva time to sprawl without committing too much to the attack. The middle left frame shows Silva’s spinning back kick — a powerful strike which forces the opponent to stay at a distance. It is very hard to smother a spinning back kick and clinch — the kick is simply too powerful and long.

The middle right frame shows another low, low kick — this time to the shin of Maia. This kick is rather counter-intuitive because it is a shin on shin collision — something that is to be avoided at all costs in Muay Thai — but it scored points. The bottom left frame shows Anderson’s jab — notice how far back his hips are as he leans forward at the waist. This is not a powerful jab, or one that is correct by traditional standards — but if Maia attempts to duck under and shoot (as most grapplers would) Anderson is already half way to a sprawl. All he needs to do is move his front leg back, level with his rear leg and Maia will have an impossible task in finishing his shot. This is an important development in Andersons game — Daiju Takase took Anderson down as Anderson attempted to land a powerful jab. Anderson sprawled on Takase, but was unsuccessful and was taken down and submitted. His modern jab, which is not a committed power punch, makes it much easier for Anderson to sprawl effectively by keeping his hips away from his opponent. The final frame is Anderson’s side kick to the knee — Bruce lee was a major proponent of this technique because it is the longest technique against the closest target. It is also almost impossible to catch.

While there is no denying that Silva’s wrestling has improved, the vast majority of improvement have come from his counter-striking style against grapplers. They cannot shoot from out in the open because Anderson can simply run backwards, they cannot corner him because there are no sharp corners in the octagon (unlike in Anderson’s early career), and so they are forced to strike their way towards him. Often they do this by timidly jabbing which normally results in Silva mugging and avoiding all their blows. After Silva had dropped a round to Chael Sonnen, he came out for the second round with a visible urgency; immediately throwing power punches at Sonnen. As soon as he threw a hard kick, Sonnen took him down with ease. This wasn’t Sonnen’s elite wresting, this was Anderson’s tactical error. As Silva was flustered and needed to make up for a dismal first round, he abandoned the safe tactics which have made him such a force against most grapplers.

Notice how Anderson is clearly too close to kick safely, yet does so because he is flustered and wants to hurt Sonnen. The kick connects before it reaches it’s ideal velocity and rotation, and is therefore muffled and easy for Sonnen to catch.

Anderson Silva’s refusal to strike first is an integral part of his style, and when he does lead it is almost always with techniques designed to keep his weight away from the opponent and encourage them to strike back at him. This reluctance to lead does not hurt Silva in most fights because nobody is going to outpoint Silva, and point deductions for inactivity are very rare. Patrick Cote attempted to force Silva to lead, but ultimately accomplished little.

Is there any way this reluctance to lead can be exploited? Not really. But if Anderson can be flustered, by dropping a round convincingly, he will be forced to lead — and that will expose him to the takedowns that he avoids so well when he is patient.

There’s much more.