Wrestling is famously the world's oldest sport, however true world championships have only been around for the last 70 years or so. Wrestling was first featured at the Olympics in 1904 but did not become a regular staple at the quadrennial until 1924, and it wasn't until 1951 that true World Championships became a regular event on the international wrestling circuit. 

So 1951 is the year we will start with for our retrospective of total medals earned by every wrestling federation using our favorite device: the celebrated heat map.

But before we consult the cartography, a few points of order. 

To create these maps, we needed to use the political boundaries of the world as they exist today, not as they existed for most of the second half of the 20th century. Thus, for example, all medals won by the Soviet Union will be coded to Russia, even if the individuals who won the medals were from what are now independent sovereign nations, such as Georgia and Azerbaijan. 

Germany, of the Eastern, Western, and Unified Team Of varieties, proved to be particularly tricky geopolitical waters to navigate. There was also the Unified Team of ex-Soviet countries at the 1992 Olympics, as well as the dissolution of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Luckily for the latter two republics, only four total medals were earned by their successor states, so they were not too difficult to track down and catalog. 

For values, we used a scale of three points for gold, two for silver, and one for bronze. There may have also been some historical revisions due to medal getting stripped after doping violations were revealed, but that is just an inaccuracy we will have to live with for now. 

Now without further adieu, Here's the map of the world from 1951 to 2017.

Russia dominates, unsurprisingly. Additionally, every ex-Soviet country has gotten in on the medal-winning action except for Turkmenistan and the Baltic nations. And here is the chart with the medal count. 

The other usual suspects, meaning the United States and Iran, are also near the top of the list. That full list, with ever medal by every country since 1951, is below.

The Soviet Union hasn't existed for over 25 years and it still has twice as many gold medals as the next closest wrestling federation, that being the United States of America. That's pretty dang impressive.

That's also a lot of data to digest, so let's break it down by decade. 

Below is the map for 1950s and '60s combined.

Turkey had their best performances in the nascent years of international competition. Iran, Japan, and Bulgaria also had stellar periods immediately following World War II. 

The table with all the data for those two decades is below.

The '70s saw the USA emerge as an international power. But the headline story was still the Soviet Union vacuuming up every medal in sight. 

There were 10 weight classes throughout the 1970s, and there was a World Championship every year the Olympics weren't held. So there were 100 gold medals up for grabs, and the USSR won 53 of them. It only missed on a medal of any kind 19 times in 100 chances. This was also in the era before the double bronze. 

From this evidence we can confidently conclude that the USSR was, like, really really good at wrestling. It was basically an all-star team with Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians, Moldovans, and Belarussians competing alongside the rest of the inhabitants of the Russian Federation. 

Below is the table for the '70s.

The years go by and we follow the arrow of time to the 1980s, where the cold war is played out on the wrestling mat. Unfortunately for Team America, the Soviet Union is still really really good at wrestling.

The USSR is still the dominant force in the world of wrestling, winning over half of the gold medals contested in the decade (we're still on the 10 weight classes a year schedule). The Americans come in second, in both total and gold medal counts. Skewing the data, unfortunately, are the boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Olympics, but such is the pitfalls of international competitions.  

The table for the 1980s is below. 

The 1990s was a springtime of nations, and it showed as 29 different federations won medals in this decade, the most of any of the 10 year time frames. 

Nine ex-soviet federations won medals for the first time in the 90s. Iran shook off their 1980s slump, and American stepped into the void left by the retreating Soviet sports machine. 

Where once all the glory would go to the mighty USSR, now the medals would be split up between nearly a dozen entities. That cleared a path for the Americans to capture the most medals, as long as the Russian and the Soviet Union's medals are counted separately as they are in the table below (but are not, we should note, on our heat map). 

The next stop on our journey through wrestling history is the first decade of the new millennium. Here is the map for the 2000s. 

Russia came roaring back with a vengeance, winning 35 of 72 gold medals and twice as many total medals as #2 Iran over the same time period, thus ending the brief period of parity in international wrestling. 

The table for the double-ohs is below. 

And last but not least, a heat map for the results of the last eight years of world and Olympic Championships, from 2010 to 2017, can be found below.

Although Russia is still well out in front of the pack, the rest of the world appears to be catching up, and a new age of parity may be on the horizon. 

Russia "only" won 15 of 53 gold medals with just two years of competition left in the decade. The United States is on pace for one of their best decades, thanks to gold medal-winning performances by Jordan Burroughs (5), Kyle Snyder (3), Jake Varner (1), and Logan Stieber (1). 

Additionally, as wrestling grew in Eastern Europe, it contracted in the West, with Italy (thanks to Frank Chamizo) being the only Western European country to win a world level medal in approximately two decades. 

The table for the twenty-teens is below.

And that concludes our global tour of wrestling history. Hope you enjoyed it and see you next time!