It's (finally) official: Spencer Lee is heading to Paris to compete in the 2024 Olympic Games.
Lee ran through the field at 57 kg at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials last month in State College, culminating in a pair of wins over Thomas Gilman, Lee's predecessor at 125 lbs in the Iowa lineup. Those wins earned Lee the 57 kg spot on the United States team for the Olympics. The wins didn't guarantee that Lee would be able to compete in the Olympics, though, because the United States had not yet qualified to compete at 57 kg in Paris.
To officially qualify for the 2024 Olympics, Lee needed to finish in the top-three at this weekend's 2024 World Olympic Games Qualifier tournament in Istanbul, Turkey. That meant winning four straight matches on Saturday to make it to the final at the weight, which Lee did in (mostly) dominant fashion, winning three of four matches by technical fall, including a 36-second 10-0 tech fall victory in the semifinal over Kazakhstan's Rakhat Kalzahn to lock up qualification.
In fact, not only did three of Lee's four wins come via technical fall, all three of those technical fall victories happened in under a minute. His day started with a brisk 23-second destruction of Morocco's Ben Tarik in the opening round. Lee got a fast takedown and went into a series of leg laces to end the match quickly with a 12-2 technical fall.
Lee's second round match at the qualifying tournament proved to be his most challenging of the event, which was the expectation after the brackets were released and set up a possible showdown between Lee and the bracket's 1-seed, Wanhao Zou of China. Zou looked like a formidable opponent on paper as a bronze medalist at the 2018 U23 World Championships and a Top 10 finisher at the last 2022 and 2023 World Championships.
Zou provided to be a formidable opponent on the mat as well, as Lee had to sweat a 10-9 decision win. Zou jumped out to a 6-1 lead, but Lee responded with a takedown and three leg laces to take a 10-6 lead into the break. Zou got a step-out point and added another takedown to cut Lee's lead to 10-9 in the second period. He also finished the match on top of Lee on the mat, but Spencer was able to prevent Zou from turning him and held on for the 10-9 win.
Having knocked off the bracket's 1-seed, Lee proceeded to wrestle like he was the real 1-seed in the bracket. In the quarterfinal round, Vladimir Egorov, a former Russian wrestler now wrestling for Macedonia and a former European champion, fell to Lee via 12-2 technical fall in 54 seconds.
Lee got a go-behind into an early takedown then locked up an arm bar to turn Egorov and expose his back in a move that ought to look very familiar to anyone who watched Lee in an Iowa singlet. Egorov was able to counter and expose Lee's back to the mat, but Lee then re-adjusted, got to Egorov's legs, and rattled off a series of leg laces to secure the technical fall and end the match.
In the semifinal, Lee faced Rakhat Kalzhan of Kazakhstan, who won silver at the 2022 Senior Asian Championships and bronze at the 2023 Asian Championships and finished 14th at the 2022 World Championships. Much like he did against Tarik and Egorov, Lee made short work of Kalzhan, blasting him with a 10-0 technical fall in just 36 seconds.
Lee got a quick takedown and then went into a series of four gutwrenches on the mat to rack up 10 points in the blink of an eye and end the bout in a hurry.
The win over Kalzhan ends Lee's tournament. Since the purpose of this event is to determine qualifiers for the upcoming Olympic Games in Paris, rather than to determine the best wrestler at the contested weights, there are no finals or gold medal matches. Both semifinal winners qualify for the Olympics, while the semifinal losers will compete in a modified consolation bracket (called repechage) tomorrow for a chance to earn the third and final qualification slot.
Today's wins mean that Spencer Lee is now officially an Olympian, becoming the 20th different Iowa wrestler to qualify for the Olympics. In fact, Iowa has had at least one wrestler at every Summer Olympics since 1980, except 2012.
Lee will also be looking to continue Iowa's trend of success at the lower weights at the Olympics. Nine different Iowa wrestlers have combined to qualify for 25 Olympic or World Championship teams at 57 kg (or an equivalent weight), earning 13 medals in the process, starting with Terry McCann's gold medal at 57 kg in Rome in 1960.
Iowa wrestlers have won four medals at 57 kg (or a comparable weight) at the Olympics, with the most recent being Thomas Gilman's bronze medal in Tokyo in 2020*. McCann is the only former Hawkeye to win a gold medal at 57 kg at the Olympics; the other former Iowa medalists were Barry Davis (silver in Los Angeles in 1984), Terry Brands (bronze in Sydney in 2000), and Gilman (the aforementioned bronze in 2020).
* Which was actually contested in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but still gets referred to as the "2020 Olympic Games."
Since day one, the goal for Lee has always been championships -- first Pennsylvania state championships, then youth world championships, and most recently NCAA championships. Now the goal is winning an Olympic gold medal. There's still a lot of work to do on that front, but Saturday's matches, just like the Olympic Team Trial bouts back in April, were a necessary step along the path of that gold medal quest.
First Lee had to win a spot on the U.S. Olympic team -- mission accomplished.
Then Lee had to qualify the U.S. to compete at 57 kg at the Olympics -- mission accomplished.
Next up? A summer of training, followed by a trip to Paris to try and become the first Iowa wrestler to win Olympic gold since Tom Brands did so in Atlanta in 1996. Based on how Lee roared through the bracket on Saturday, he ought to have an excellent shot at gold in Paris.
The 2024 Olympic Summer Games are set to take place in Paris, France from July 26 to August 11.
