Gable Steveson after winning gold at the 2014 Cadet World Championships (Photo/Richard Immel; RImmelPics.com)The UWW Cadet World Championships will take place July 19th through 25th in Budapest, Hungary. This will be the 10th edition since the event went uncontested from 2000-2010. As the youngest age group with an official UWW World Championship, this tournament is often our first look at the stars of tomorrow. Just since the 2011 restart, we've seen Cadet golds earned by Abdulrashid Sadulaev (RUS), David Baev (RUS), Gadzhimurad Rashidov (RUS), Zaur Uguev (RUS), Takuto Otoguro (JPN), and Risako Kawai (JPN). Each of those athletes has since won a world title at the Senior level. Oddly enough, it has yet to happen on the Greco side, but it's only a matter of time.
With so many future stars on display, we got to wondering. Would it be possible to predict the future success of a country, at the Junior and Senior levels, by watching their performance at the Cadet World Championships? To find out, we gathered all wrestlers placing in the top 6 at Cadet, Junior, and Senior world championships and Olympic Games since Cadets returned in 2011. We used these results to give each nation a score in each style for each year. I could have simply used the UWW scoring system, but given the randomness that often influences who gets seventh through 10th place, I wanted to exclude that. With unbalanced brackets and mostly random draw, there is enough random chance to account for already. So, I settled on 10 points for a gold medal, 6 for silver, 3 for bronze, and 1 for a fifth-place finish. There are plenty of different scoring systems that would have worked but, in general, we wanted to give heavy rewards to the champions as they seem most likely to continue their success as they move up in level.
After scoring everything, we looked at each country's three-year rolling average of points in each style. This method prevents any one year from having too big of an impact. What we're looking for here are nations where the performances move to a new level, good or bad, for a sustained period, not just those that had one big tournament. Remember that wrestlers are eligible for the Cadet tournament for two years, but eligible as Juniors for as many as four years if they opt for the older age category in their last year of Cadet eligibility or do both. So, countries that see a rise in scores at the Cadet level that persists have a better chance of converting that success to the Junior level, where more years of wrestlers can be on the same team, and at the Senior level, where that is even more pronounced.
Here are the 10 largest gains in three-year average across all three styles through 2017. We wanted to limit this list to those who have had at least two years since so we can see if their impact has been felt at the Junior level. The Cadets have had 10 weights every year since 2011 so all years have equal potential for scoring. Japan's women's freestyle team leads the way with their absurd 2016 performance when they put nine in the finals and claimed eight gold medals. Even for possibly the most dominant single-style entity in international wrestling, that tournament was incredible. You'll notice their 2017 team also makes the list because, while their overall performance was just short of 2016, their three-year average continued to rise. This is the sustained performance level change we're looking for.
I'm sure many readers also spotted the United States' three entries in the top 10, all in men's freestyle, and each coming in consecutive years. From 2011 through 2013, just before this run, Team USA won just four medals in MFS, though three of those were gold. From 2014 through 2016, they won at least that many every year, peaking with a seven medal performance in 2016. Members of those teams included Mark Hall, Spencer Lee, Yianni Diakomihalis, and Gable Steveson.
So, how did these 10 squads do as they got older?
This chart tells us what the three-year average change was at the Junior level one, two, and three years on in addition to the Senior level three, four, and five years on. As you can see Japan's WFS hammers started to push their Junior performances to another level, especially after both the 2016 and 2017 teams became Junior eligible. The same happened for Team USA in MFS as the Junior performances have consistently improved as these excellent Cadet teams have moved up. Sometimes this is due to the same wrestlers continuing their success. Mark Hall and Gable Steveson won Junior crowns in 2017, for example, after being part of the Cadet rise. However, sometimes others step in to compete with the Cadet stars and overtake them when they can or the elevated success is due to a more competitive program in general which will eventually show its depth.
It is clear from this chart that sustained success at the Cadet level almost always translates to better results at the Junior level. We need more data to say the same about the Senior level, though. Team USA has certainly seen a rise in success as the 2014 Cadet crew move towards those ranks. However, we just don't have enough years of Cadet data to make any real determination just yet.
We looked at the good, but what about the bad? Azerbaijan sticks out here not only for having far and away the biggest negative change, but for making the list in both Greco and MFS. Their federation has struggled financially at times which may play into it. The Greco team had won 22 medals in the first four Cadet championships after the hiatus, only to fall to just three, all bronze in 2015. Kazakhstan also makes the list in two styles, men's and women's freestyle. Azerbaijan hosted the tournament in 2012 which may help explain why 2015, when the 2012 performances roll off the three-year average, was such a bad-looking year for them. Kazakhstan has not hosted the Cadet World Championships during this time.
One note before we dig in, the Junior World Championships moved from 8 weights in 2017 to 10 in 2018. So, there were more points available for some of the teams on this list two or three years down the road. Still, we see some correlation between poor performances at the Cadet and Junior levels as the competitors age. Azerbaijan cratered at the Junior level after their disastrous 2015 and the majority saw their average decrease. Russia's 2016 MFS team is a notable exception. After good performances from 2011-2013, Russia had their best performance by our metric in 2015, but it was surrounded by their two worst in those six years so their average dropped noticeably. It appears the group that did so well in 2015 was able to carry the load at the Junior level or Russia's development work got the job done because they improved considerably at the Junior level from 2017-2019. It will be interesting to track this data over the next several years as Russia's MFS had by far their worst performance in this data set in 2018. It was sandwiched by far superior performances so it will be interesting to see if it has an impact at the Junior level.
The Senior level data continues to be a bit too incomplete to draw conclusions from. It seems clear that the Cadet results when viewed in this manner give us a decent idea of how a nation will do at the Junior level over the next few years. So, perhaps we should look at the Junior level data in a similar manner to see if it shows something similar with the top level of international wrestling.
While we could go back further on the Junior side, I thought it would be useful to use the same period that we just looked at on the Cadet side so that the data has a similarity to it. Interestingly, we see Azerbaijan all over this chart. Perhaps part of the reason that they fell off so hard at the Junior level after their difficulties on the Cadet side is that their Junior teams had set a high standard. This is always something we must watch out for when using a relative measure like average points. An outstanding performance for one country may be an abysmal one for another. Having a lot of success is a good thing, but it also means that the standard has been raised going forward. The 2014 MFS Team USA making this list while the Cadets made their side from 2014-2016 suggest what most fans have felt, that the age group level MFS performances have been on the rise is backed up by the numbers.
Because the Juniors are closer to the Senior level, most are eligible to compete at the Senior level as they are wrestling Juniors, we were able to expand out the Senior level years we could look at. We did limit this chart to those in 2016 and before so we could get at least three years at the Senior level to investigate. Oddly, among the largest average gains at the Junior level, only half saw an overall rise in their Senior level results over the next five years or the data we have so far. Senior-level wrestling also moved from eight to 10 weights in 2018 and we included both Olympic Games and World Championship data from the years where both were held. So, we would have expected a more pronounced impact. Let's look at the biggest average drops and see if it looks similar.
The biggest average losses are even more confounding as eight of them saw their Senior level performance improve after falling off at the Junior level. This is certainly a far cry from what we saw from the Cadet to the Junior level. However, there are some explanations. As mentioned previously, the points available at the Senior level have gone up so, overall when you're comparing rolling averages that include 2017 and before with those including 2018 and after, they should go up by 25%. That may help explain some of this chart, but then we would have expected to see positive numbers all over the largest gainers and that wasn't the case.
Likely a better explanation is that the Senior level sees longer careers, especially amongst its stars who have the greatest impact on the scores as calculated here. A country that has a dip in performance at the Junior level can survive and even thrive at the Senior level as long as their previous generations continue to develop. If those lesser Junior teams happen to provide one or two contributors each year, so much the better. To score well at the Junior level, you now need 10 weights over three to four years. On the Senior level, you can use 10+ years of wrestlers in some cases to piece together a quality line-up.
As the Cadet World Championship continues, we'll have more data points to examine, but it already appears clear that what many would naturally assume is true, success at the Cadet level translates to the Junior level in short order. We may eventually be able to see an impact at the Senior level, but we'll need longer time frames at a minimum. It may also be that having success at the age group levels as a country isn't as closely tied to team success at the Senior level as we'd expect. We'll certainly circle back to this topic down the line to see if what we've found so far continues or if the data reveals something new as there is more of it to analyze.
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