It’s no secret that former two-division UFC champion Daniel Cormier always keeps a watchful eye on the best wrestlers coming up in the United States.
As a two-time Olympian and current coach of a high-school wrestling team, Cormier stays close to the sport he grew up loving before becoming a fighter, but it turns out he actually interacted with a future American gold medalist several years ago and didn’t even know it. Primarily training out of the American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose, Cormier crosses paths with a lot of fighters, Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners, and wrestlers who also work out at the gym — and that included future 2024 Olympic gold medalist Amit Elor.
“A little backstory, Amir Elor used to always be around the Bay area with a woman named Carolyn Wester, she coached at a club called Wrestling Prep and she teaches wrestling,” Cormier said on The Fighter vs. The Writer. “She’s a lady that coaches and she’s a tremendous coach, very smart lady.
“She would bring Amit into [American Kickboxing Academy]. I didn’t know who she was but she would wrestle with the boys. I have all these pictures of Amit, and Carolyn would take pictures of Amit with the team. That’s one thing they do in MMA gyms. At the end of practice, everybody gets together for a photo. Amit’s in a lot of those pictures.”
Elor’s work obviously paid off. She captured gold at 68kg with a stunning run through the 2024 Olympics, ultimately outscoring her opponents by a ridiculous margin of 31-2. At 20 years old, she also became the youngest American to ever win a gold medal in wrestling — a record once held by Henry Cejudo, who won his gold medal in 2008.
None of it came to a surprise to Elor’s coach, who told Cormier before the Olympics started that she was going to dominate the field.
“Carolyn goes, ‘Amit’s wrestling [at the Olympics],’ and I go, ‘The little girl from the gym?’” Cormier recounted. “She’s like, ‘Yeah, and she’s going to win.’ I’m like, ‘She’s that good?’ And she was like, ‘She’s going to win.’”
Not only did Elor win in emphatic fashion, she shared that glory with her teammates after the U.S. women went home with two gold medals — the other won by Sarah Hildebrandt — a silver from 20-year-old phenom Kennedy Blades, and a bronze for Helen Maroulis.
“She killed it,” Cormier said of Elor. “That first match, talk about bad luck. The World Champion from the year before from that weight class gets the World Champion from the weight up in her very first match. [Elor] destroys her. She went onto kill the rest of the field after that.”
While Elor’s focus remains on wrestling, especially with the 2028 Olympics happening in her home state of California, she has a lot of time left to accomplish even more goals.
Elor could potentially wrestle across at least three Olympic cycles and would only be 28 when it was all over.
When the day comes that she hangs her singlet up for the final time, Cormier believes Elor is destined to make waves in MMA.
“She’s going to fight,” Cormier said. “She’s going to be a fighter. For as good as she is in wrestling, she does really well in judo, she does tremendous in jiu-jitsu. If she does start doing [MMA] competitively, they’re going to be in trouble.”
First things first, Cormier wants Elor to stick with wrestling because she’s going to remain a huge asset to the American team. As much as Cormier loved his UFC career and the money and accomplishments that came along with it, he knows there’s nothing quite like chasing Olympic glory.
“We can’t lose Amit Elor,” Cormier said. “I love when great wrestlers come into mixed martial arts, but I’m always for them doing it after they’re done chasing their Olympic dreams. You don’t get to do that again. If you have an opportunity to be the best in the world, you chase that as long as you can and then you go do something different. I don’t think it should be coming earlier than needed.
“You go and wrestle as long as you need to wrestle, and then you come to try and make the money as the UFC fighter.”
