The wrestling Saitiev's

[Beebs]

This is a direct copy and paste from a post on my fight related thread on another, non fighting, forum, so its dumbed down a bit, sorry for that, but its still interesting. I mentioned Buvasair in the "best pfp combat athlete" thread.

The Saitiev brothers, two of the best in the world, with the older, Buvasair being probably the best pound for pound wrestler in the world if not the best pound for pound combat sport athlete in the world, and his younger brother Adam being one of the best in his weight class. Both are from Dagestan but consider themselves Chechen ethnically.

Both have a style a little different than most American wrestlers who usually start out in Folkstyle compared to the International Freestyle. They both wrestle more from the clinch, and are both insanely good at it, getting alot of throws, trips, and snapdowns. They don't shoot for the legs as much as most Americans.

Buvaisar Saitiev
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Buvaisar is the older and and actually slightly bigger brother, despite wrestling in the smaller 74kg / 162lb category. The reason is that Adam isn't quite small enough to make 66kg / 145lbs, and can't beat Buvaisar at 74 so he wrestles at 84kg / 184lbs.

Buvaisar won his first gold medal in 1996, and then went undefeated until the 2000 games where he was upset by the eventual Gold Medal winner, American Brandon Slay. Buvaisar then went on to win the 2004 gold and plans on entering the 2008 games too, and has a good shot at winning.

At the 2004 games there was a really disputed match between Saitiev and a Belarussian wrester and basically a melee broke out, with reports of punches being thrown.

Highlight
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Matches
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Adam Saitiev
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Adam is not quite as good as his brother, but his results are almost as impressive as he is wrestling almost 2 categories up in weight from where he could be, and still has a gold medal to his name, which he won in 2000.

Matches
The first match is actually against Cael Sanderson, who most of you have probably heard of, the guy from Iowa State who went undefeated in college and then won a gold medal. Just to show how good Adam is, this was considered a pretty big upset, which also goes to show how good Cael is too.
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[ufoalf]

In Adam's defense, he was wrestling a heavier weight class.

[ufoalf]

I have been curious, why Elite Russian Federation Wrestlers never seem to segway into MMA? NO! Matyushenko is not an exception. He was never considered elite.

I guess it is basically obvious. Independent clubs such as Red Devil and RTT get little to no government funding. Keeping MMA on the back burner, so to speak.

You cannot tell me that a guy like Artur Taymazov would not do well in MMA. He is everything that many Americnas are hoping Brock Lesnar will turn into.

Because MMA scene in Russia only started taking off couple of years ago unlike in America or Japan. Plus MMA is not an olympic sport which is a HUGE influence on direction for Russian athletes.

[Dostoevsky]

Well Fedor and Putin have met several times and have even had dinner together.
Putin was ringside at Fedor's fight with Lindland, He is apparently a fan of Fedor, both Fedor and Putin are a master of sports and black belt in Judo.

If MMA becomes acceptable and more encouraged by the state, we may see an even bigger influx of Russians into the MMA scene.
With the exception of Fedor nearly all the world class Russian combat athletes stay amatuer.
They are amazing wrestlers and will do well in MMA and perhaps even eclipse American wrestlers (which as always been the US' forte)