Wrestling Blogs - Andy Hrovat

To answer some of the questions, right now this trip isn't costing me anything. USA wrestling is paying for it, I was planning on coming over here to wrestle in the Yariguin tournament at the end of the month so the airfare was already paid for. As for the food I has been great, good soups, meat, pasta, potatoes, eggs fir breakfast. The dinning experience has been different though. There is assigned seating how it goes I have no idea. There are 40 seats in the cafeteria and when we all walk in everyone sits down. A few wrestlers walk up to the serving line and bring back the food for their table. At my table is Besik Kudokov, Irebk Farniev, and another wrestler who I am not sure of his name. My first few days here Kudokov would not allow me to do anything. He brought me my food, poured my drinks, gave me hot tea, and cleared my plates when I was finished. Everytable is like that all the wrestlers chip in and really take care of each other. I slowly worked my way into helping out. The wrestling culture here is like that of a big family, like a world champion serving a younger wrestler food. When people come into the wrestling room they walk around and make sure they shake everyones hand and show everyone the respect they deserve.

This really opened my eyes when I first took notice to it. Last month at the freestyle summit in Colorado we talked about developing future talent in the US. This is a great example as to how and do it, the

Junior team and Senior team train together but unlike here in America after the training is done we go our own ways in the dorms and cafeteria. Here they are friends, and it is almost like they are

mentoring the future talent and prepping them for when they get a shot at wrestling for a world and Olympic title.

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Day OFF

So after a week of training every day I was looking forward to my day off. The only problem was that before we had a day off we had a sauna so no coaches were there. After the sauna I had about 2 hours before dinner so I was in my room reading the book BLINK. When I went down to dinner I was the only one there the dorm was like a ghost town. Later that night around 1015 the power went out as I was watching tv. I guess they cut the electricity and forgot I was there, I am just happy

we had heat.

I really didn't care that much so I just went to bed. The next morning I was worried about eating. When I went down to the cafe none of the cooking ladies were there, so I went back and ate an orange for

breakfast. I went back down around 11 and I heard music and after about 5 minutes of knocking the girl heard me and cooked me up some eggs. I went back to my room so I could dress warm and walk into town but as I was getting ready the coach Mirek Tadeev came to my room and picked me up for sight seeing.

So before we went sight seeing we stopped by his house and picked up his family. While we were there his wife made me food so I had to force it down even though I just ate and I was full. We then went to

the car and took off for a long ride up into the caucus mountains. Our first stop was a look out site above a river that fir some reason had 4 caged grizzly bears and a caged leapord. It was sad but pretty cool. The next stop was a monestary and church where he and his family prayed. Before heading down we stopped by the Ossetian training center for the summer ran by Kadartsev(sp?). More of his family met he there for a good diner of chicken and sheep. Our final thing to do before we left was shoot his AK47 into the air. On a side not the AK47 inventor is from Vladikavkaz I saw in at the world cup last year.