Dan McDonald
Nearly 50 boys of all ages crowded around the wrestling mats Tuesday afternoon at Red’s Health & Racquet Club, watching Daniel Cormier and learning.
Getting that kind of up-close instruction from an Olympian, a three-time national champion and a member of the U.S. team for the World Championships doesn’t happen every day.
The quality of that instruction is important to Cormier, but he was happier with the quantity Tuesday. The turnout for the first sessions of the Daniel Cormier Wrestling Camp was nearly twice the numbers that the camp drew last year.
“Maybe my success over the last year helped, “Cormier said, “but I think what was more important was the exposure of the sport. People here were able to follow what I did at the Olympics every day, keeping up with my career, and that’s helped them know that there’s wrestling out there.”
Lafayette native Cormier and USA World Team teammates Mo Lawal and Tyrone Lewis (Lewis on the World University Games Team) worked with wrestlers of all sizes and ability levels during the first day of the two-day camp that wraps up today. Cormier was impressed with the talent level of the camp pool, but he wasn’t surprised.
“I came down during the winter and I got to see some high school matches, “the former Northside High standout said. “It’s not just the same teams that are good. Every team I saw was making an effort to improve themselves. I saw a lot of improvement from Acadiana and Carencro, teams that are better known for football, and that’s big.
“I’m not taking any credit, but something’s getting the kids to want to wrestle again.”
Maybe Cormier should take some credit, since a lot of Acadiana sports fans were watching him go after his Olympic dream last August. That dream came up just short of a medal, with a fourth-place finish, but his two-year march from an unheralded prospect to the unquestioned best in the U.S. at 96 kg (211 1/2 pounds) stimulated local interest in the sport.
That fourth-place finish also stimulated the 26-year-old Cormier, who committed himself to another four-year cycle right after the Olympics and is already aiming toward the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
“It really wasn’t a decision at all, “Cormier said. “I knew even before that I was going to continue. Even though the Olympic results wasn’t what I had hoped, the experience was still fun and I enjoyed the experience. There’s no need for me to stop.”
No need, indeed, especially since he’s dominated U.S. and Western Hemisphere competition ever since winning his first national title in 2003. He also won the Pan American Games title, and in the last six months he won four of five matches at the World Cup in Uzbekistan and captured a gold medal in the Ivan Yarygin Memorial in Russia, becoming one of only five Americans ever to win at one of the world’s premier events.
His next target is the World Championships Sept. 27-Oct. 3 in Budapest, Hungary – the same city in which he wrestled his first-ever international competition with the U.S. Cadet Team at age 15. That’s not much older than most of the campers he’s working with this week.
“That was really the first time that I thought that wrestling could turn into something, “he said. “I still wasn’t sure, but if I put my mind to it I thought something might happen.”
That type of mental discipline has served Cormier well and helped him work through an exhausting schedule. He arrived in Lafayette early Tuesday after working a camp in Cleveland, and he’s got camps at home in Stillwater and at San Diego before he heads to USA Wrestling’s World Team camp in Fargo, N.D. on July 23. There are several more team camps, most of them at USA Wrestling’s headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo., prior to the World Championships.
“I’ve been home maybe seven, eight days in the last month and a half, “Cormier said. “It’s hard, but it’s been hard for 15 years now. When you don’t accomplish what you want to accomplish, it really doesn’t cross your mind to stop. I know I won’t be able to go through the same grind after 2008, but I’m going to be around for a while.”
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