THE BIG IRTC STORY FROM BILL FARRELL

April 07, 2022

In yesterday's post, "ILLINOIS Regional Training Center Rocks the Bill Farrell," I left out the biggest IRTC story. Why? Because I was ignorant.

I needed to educate myself.

I knew of leg fouls. They are a big no-no in Greco. But I didn't really know about leg fouls. My knowledge of leg fouls is like my knowledge of how a TV works. I would need to research the rules.

Now that I have, I think I can write about the big IRTC story from Bill Farrell.

You see, there was this guy ...

His name is Kamal Bey, and he's kind of a big thing in Greco.

He joined the IRTC recently to some fanfare and rejoicing. That's when he entered the Bill Farrell Open. Kamal Bey wins in the first two rounds by tech fall. In the next round, he faces #1 seed Jesse Porter.

At 2:11 of the second period, Bey's already up by the score of 2-1, and Porter is hit for passivity, giving the IRTC star another point. That makes the score 3-1 in favor of Kamal, and Porter is put in the down position.

That's when the ugliness begins.

Bey does what Bey does, which is to lift a guy up, getting ready to chunk him over his head. The problem is that Porter wrapped his leg around Bey's leg and basically tripped him. IRTC Coach Bryan Medlin posted a Twitter thread that contained a gif showing the leg foul. Here's a screengrab of the first post in that thread (note that I have added the arrow and "LEG FOUL"):

You can watch video of the whole match below. The relevant sequence starts at about 8:23 with an offensive attempt by Kamal, followed by the ref signifying passivity on red (Porter). At 8:31, the ref awards the point to Bey for Porter's passivity.

At 8:50, the wrestlers restart in the par terre position with Kamal on top. At 9:11, the clear leg foul occurs:

My ignorance about leg fouls raised these questions in my mind. Can a leg foul be inadvertent? Can a referee decide, subjectively, that an offensive wrestler was not going to score anyway, with or without the leg foul, and therefore not call it?

I found the answers to these questions from an official post by the Olympic committee about the rules of Greco-Roman wrestling and from the official UWW rules. They provide as follows:

As you can see, it doesn't matter if the leg foul is intentional or inadvertent. In either case, the referee must stop the match and award two points to the wrestler who was fouled. In this match, that would have made the score Kamal Bey 5, Jesse Porter 1.

The match actually ended up 4-3 for Porter.

What is most upsetting to folks who know Greco is that the sequence was bricked and reviewed. For some reason, the challenge was denied, even though the view from the review camera was supposedly identical to the video above.

And that view clearly shows a leg foul.

Here's a screengrab from the end of the sequence. Is that Coach Medlin and Max Nowry pointing out the leg foul?