TEHRAN – World and Olympic champions Hassan Yazdani of Iran and David Taylor from the U.S. will likely wrestle at the 86kg weight class of the 2022 World Championships.
The competition will be held on September 15-16 in Belgrade, Serbia.
The top eight wrestlers will be seeded at the world championships based on points accumulated at rankings events since the Tokyo Olympics. Of all the weights, the seeds at 86kg are the truest in representing the weight’s top wrestlers.
Since 2017, every world or Olympic gold medal at 86kg was won by either Hassan Yazdani or David Taylor, flowrestling.org reported.
Yazdani won world titles in 2017, 2019, and 2021 while Taylor won world gold in 2018 and Olympic gold in 2021. Yazdani and Taylor’s rivalry might be the greatest in all of wrestling right now and they will likely lock horns in this year’s world finals.
Taylor owned the first three matches against Yazdani winning at the 2017 world cup, 2018 world championships, and Tokyo Olympics. While Taylor came out on top each time, every match was a back-and-forth battle with one or two exchanges being the difference in the outcome.
In fact, in all three of Taylor’s wins, Yazdani had built a lead in the first period before Taylor was able to chase him down in the second period. Most of their matches have been a “tale of 2 periods” with Yazdani outscoring Taylor by a combined 12-4 in the first period, but Taylor outscoring Yazdani by a combined 21-6 in the second period. Taylor clearly used his pace to wear Yazdani down to get the win in the first 3 matches.