Amit Elor of the United States celebrates winning gold against Meerim Zhumanazarova of Kyrgyzstan in the women’s freestyle 68kg wrestling finals of the 2024 Paris Olympics on Aug. 6, 2024. Photo: Reuters/Arlette Bashizi
American-Israeli wrestler Amit Elor won the gold medal on Tuesday at the Olympics Games in Paris in the women’s freestyle wrestling 68-kg finals, making her the youngest wrestler in the history of the US to win a gold at the Olympics and also a first-time winner.
The 20-year-old, who is competing in the Olympic Games as part of Team USA, extended her five-year winning streak and also became the third woman from the US to win Olympic gold in wrestling, as well as the youngest US woman to medal in wrestling at the Olympics.
She beat Meerim Zhumanazarova of Kyrgyzstan 3-0 at the Champ-de-Mars Arena in Paris after taking a lead early on in the match with a takedown and defending herself against her opponent’s attacks throughout the remainder of the match. Zhumanazarova became the first Kyrgyz athlete to win two Olympic medals in any sport. The bronze medal went to Buse Cavusoglu of Turkey.
Elor was born in California on New Year’s Day 2004. She lives in New York, is the youngest of six siblings, and started wrestling at the age of four. Her late father Yair and mother Elana are both from Ashkelon and immigrated to the United States from Israel in the 1980s. Her brother Oshry was killed in a home invasion in 2018 and Yair died in 2022 at the age of 64.
Amit spoke only Hebrew until she was two years old and has trained in Israel while visiting family. She said in 2022, “I love Israel. In some ways I feel like I am representing them also [when competing].” Both of her grandfathers are Holocaust survivors.
After her Olympic win, the athlete admitted that before her match, she said affirmations to herself about becoming an Olympic champion.
“You know what I did today actually, which is also going to sound crazy, to help myself — I constantly, throughout the day, told myself ‘You’re gonna become an Olympic champion today.’ Literally, again and again and again. I did not stop,” she said.
“Normally I don’t do that in competitions,” she added. “But today, I was like, I don’t wanna get in my head. So I was like, again and again, ‘You’re gonna become an Olympic champion.’ And I was like, I don’t care if it’s crazy. I need to believe this. I need to go out there confident. And it helped me. I was able to go out there, and get my ties and not get in my head too much.”
At the 2022 World Wrestling Championships in Belgrade, Amit won gold and became the youngest US wrestler, male or female, to become a world champion. She is a two-time world champion in the 72-kg category — which she also won in 2023 — and won senior, under-23, and under-20 world titles in the span of three months in 2022, making her the youngest American world champion at the age of 18. She retained her titles in 2023 when she won the Pan American Championships.
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