UFC Corridor of Famer and former two-division world champion Daniel Cormier firmly believes Olympic gold medalist Amit Elor will make waves on the planet of blended martial arts as soon as she’s completed dominating the newbie wrestling scene.
As a two-time Olympian and the coach of a highschool wrestling workforce, Cormier has all the time stored a detailed eye on the game that’s stayed close to and expensive to his coronary heart lengthy after he traded within the headgear for a pair of four-ounce gloves. Doing so has allowed him to work with and prepare alongside previous, current, and future Olympians, together with Elor.
“A bit backstory, Amit Elor used to all the time be across the Bay space with a girl named Carolyn Wester, she coached at a membership known as Wrestling Prep and she or he teaches wrestling,” Cormier mentioned on The Fighter vs. The Author. “She’s a woman that coaches and she or he’s an amazing coach, very sensible woman.
“She would convey Amit into [American Kickboxing Academy]. I didn’t know who she was however she would wrestle with the boys. I’ve all these footage of Amit, and Carolyn would take footage of Amit with the workforce. That’s one factor they do in MMA gyms. On the finish of follow, all people will get collectively for a photograph. Amit’s in loads of these footage” (h/t MMA Combating).
At 20 years previous, Elor turned the youngest American to win a gold medal in wrestling, a document beforehand held by Henry Cejudo. She kicked off her match with a dominant 10-2 victory over 2023 reigning world champion Buse Tosun Çavuşoğlu of Turkey, adopted by back-to-back shutouts towards Poland’s Wiktoria Chołuj and Meerim Zhumanazarova of Kyrgyzstan.
Elor outscored her opponents by a surprising margin of 30-2 all through her run on the 2024 Olympic Video games in Paris.
“She killed it,” Cormier mentioned of Elor. “That first match, discuss dangerous luck. The World Champion from the 12 months earlier than from that weight class will get the World Champion from the burden up in her very first match. [Elor] destroys her. She went onto kill the remainder of the sector after that.”
‘DC’ stresses that Amit Elor ought to solely pursue MMA as soon as attaining her targets in wrestling
With the Summer time Olympics scheduled to go down in her residence state of California in 2028, Elor’s focus will likely be on bringing residence one other gold medal. However when the time does come for Elor to hold up her singlet, ‘DC’ thinks the Walnut Creek native might do some severe harm in four-ounce gloves.
“She’s going to struggle,” Cormier mentioned. “She’s going to be a fighter. For pretty much as good as she is in wrestling, she does rather well in judo, she does super in jiu-jitsu. If she does begin doing [MMA] competitively, they’re going to be in hassle.”
He continued,“I really like when nice wrestlers come into blended martial arts, however I’m all the time for them doing it after they’re completed chasing their Olympic desires. You don’t get to try this once more. You probably have a chance to be the perfect on the planet, you chase that so long as you’ll be able to and you then go do one thing totally different. I don’t assume it ought to be coming sooner than wanted.
“You go and wrestle so long as it’s worthwhile to wrestle, and you then come to try to make the cash because the UFC fighter.”
