With the UWW Junior World Championships recently in the books and the Cadet World Championships coming up, it's worth calling attention to the very real and inadequately addressed problem of age cheating in the sport of wrestling. 

Last May, Greco-Roman legend turned politician Alexander Karelin gave an interview to Russian news outlet RIA-Voronezh (hat tip Wrestdag.ru), in which "The Experiment" shared his thoughts about the issue, as translated via Google Translate.

This problem destroys the whole ideology of wrestling," Karelin said. "Because of this, catastrophic consequences await our national teams. Sometimes athletes come to youth tournaments five or six years older than their declared age. How can you let a 14-year-old wrestle a 20-year-old? This is a different physical state, a completely different psychology.

"Now Imagine a 20-year-old athlete who fights among young men, up to 24 years old, and then graduates into the senior level. After going through all those competitions, this fighter has been turned into slag.

"This is an ugly phenomenon that makes us unable to compete.

Karelin's reputation in the sport is unparalleled. He is a three-time Greco-Roman heavyweight Olympic gold medalist and nine-time world champion. Since 1999, a year before retiring from competition, Karelin has been an elected member of the State Duma, Russia's federal legislative body. Comments like these from a figure of Karelin's stature speaks volumes to the scarcely unacknowledged problem of age cheating in wrestling.

Wrestling coaches and clubs need funding, and that funding is often a direct result of medals won at cadet- and junior-level competitions. As long as age-based events are held then there will be incentives to lie about wrestlers' ages.

Age cheating happens in countries as virtuous as the United States in sports with stakes as low as Little League baseball. It would be foolish to assume that wrestling is somehow immune to the problem.

After Karelin's statement, it would indeed be shocking to discover that age cheating wasn't a problem in wrestling and that this was a scandal Karelin decided to invent out of whole cloth for no apparent reason.

At this time, we needn't debate any specifics about who may or may not have lied about their age in the past. While those cases should be brought up and discussed when they arise (something we have done in the past), a more productive debate for the time being would be on to how to solve the problem of age cheating as a whole. 

The first step to solving that problem is to admit that there is a problem. Given Karelin's recent interview, our hope is that the governing bodies of wrestling will assume their leadership role and take action.