Many of the nation’s top Greco Roman athletes will converge on Concord, California later this week for a special dual training camp. Led by US National Team Coach Matt Lindland, Senior-level wrestlers (including those on the 2016 US Olympic Team) will work out in the mornings to refine skills and sharpen up on areas of concentration. Following the morning sessions, the Seniors will help provide instruction to the Juniors in attendance. “If you can teach it, you can do it”, said Coach Lindland. “So, it’s my plan to let them teach and then I’m going to work with them on some technical areas for them to continue to improve on.”
In addition, Junior teams from Sweden and Hungary will be part of the festivities, which culminate with the running of the Concord Cup. In years past, the Concord Cup was an event for Seniors to compete in. This time around it’s going to be different. “There are a lot of premier Senior events all over the world and so we felt like, or actually, Bill Martell and Marc Halvorson, the guys who run and founded the Concord Cup, felt that we needed to get our Junior athletes some international matches”, says Lindland. That means this event is targeted to be a great opportunity for some of the country’s best and brightest out of the Junior ranks to engage in competition ahead of the Junior World Championships, which take place in August.
The Greco Concord Camp also marks the beginning of the unofficial countdown to Rio for the Olympians. At the conclusion of the Greco Concord Camp, the rest of May is going to see the athletes gearing up with strength and conditioning as well as honing other areas of their respective skill-sets. And then in the first week of June, Team USA will head out to Azerbaijan for three weeks of training alongside athletes from other nations as part of their pre-Olympic training before returning home in July to start the all-important final preparations for the Rio Games.