Chael Sonnen is urging the wrestling community to reject the practice of weight cutting among children.
The moment that pushed Sonnen to speak out came during a youth tournament in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
There, he witnessed an eight-year-old girl being cut from 58 pounds down to 50 — a staggering 15% of her total body weight.
According to Sonnen, the method used to achieve that drop was “nothing short of starvation”.
And in his experience, the pressure rarely comes from the kids:
I very seldomly run into a kid that’s got a really stupid idea. It’s generally always the parents and 99% of the time it’s the dads.
Sonnen questions the core logic behind forcing children to manipulate their weight:
The way to win a wrestling match isn’t to weigh more than the other guy or to have sacrificed or to cut more weight.
The way to win a wrestling match is very clear and it’s even identified on page three of the rule book.
Have more points than your opponent when time runs out.That’s how you win a match. There is no other way.
Sonnen points out that the parents enforcing these extreme regimens almost never wrestled themselves – and certainly never went through the same grueling cuts they impose on their kids.
He also addressed the flawed logic behind the weight-cut culture that persists in combat sports:
It’s a very strange concept to want to build a big tough machine while making it smaller.
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