Aichi-Nagoya: Kusaka's Slow Start and the Lesson from the Greco-Roman Mat

In the moment the whistle ending the 77kg Greco-Roman final sounded, Nao Kusaka simply stood still. His hands hung loose, not clenched, not raised to greet the crowd as a champion usually would. On the scoreboard of the Aichi-Nagoya arena, the number 5-2 appeared in favour of Mohammadreza Abdevali of Iran. The whole arena went silent for a breath, then applause swelled — the applause reserved for the loser, a sound any athlete recognises immediately, even with their back turned to the crowd. I stood in the press area, about thirty metres from the mat. Around me, my Japanese colleagues had already started typing; the headline had taken shape in their heads: Olympic champion defeated on home soil. I did not type right away. I watched Kusaka, watched how he bent down to adjust his shoelaces even though the match had long ended, watched how he shook his opponent's hand with a slowness that seemed deliberate. That was the moment I learned to wait — not to get the fastest answer, but to get the truest one. Waiting is not doing nothing. Waiting is listening to the pitch whisper, and here, listening to the mat whisper. When Kusaka entered the press conference, after nearly forty minutes of silence in the dressing room, he said a sentence I knew would stay with me for a long time: I was simply weak. Not I lost, not I made a mistake, but I was weak. A confession with no room for excuse and no room for the audience to intervene with comfort. In the dressing room, people leave behind shoes, the smell of sweat and unfinished sentences — and Kusaka left behind a sentence so complete that one could only stay silent and write it down. This year's Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games put wrestling at the centre of attention in Japan, because it is a sport the host nation was expected to dominate. Japan has long been known as a wrestling power, with a deep tradition in both branches: men's and women's wrestling. But expectation is always a double-edged sword. It lifts athletes up, and it can cut them down in a single afternoon. Kusaka entered the Games as an Olympic champion, competing on his own soil, before a home crowd, and he had set a standard for himself: to prove true strength. I have followed many tournaments in my career. I once sat in the Hongkou corridor for two hours and forty-seven minutes waiting for a striker to say one honest sentence. I once stood at the end of the mixed zone in Volgograd waiting for a player to pass by, and learned that football lives in the silences. And I once sat in a kitchen in Shanghai, listening to an old chef talk about the meals he cooked for a team that no longer had anyone. Each of those experiences taught me the same thing: the real story is not in the final score, but in how people arrive at that score. With Kusaka, the final score was 5-2. But the real story lies in the quarter-final, in the moment he trailed 9-4 and then turned it into 11-9. That was a moment anyone who has stood on a mat or a pitch understands: you cannot programme a comeback. It happens when everything else has collapsed, when there is nothing left to lose, and when your body remembers it can still do something. To understand why the quarter-final deserves mention, one must understand the rules of Greco-Roman wrestling. In this classic branch, wrestlers may attack only with the upper body and arms. They are entirely forbidden from holding below the waist. This means every attack must come from a position that in freestyle wrestling would be considered a disadvantage. You cannot lower your centre of gravity to throw an opponent with your legs. You cannot use the momentum of your whole body the way a freestyle wrestler can. Everything must come from the shoulders, the upper hips, the arms and the balance of the upper body. That is why a comeback in Greco-Roman is far harder than it looks from the outside. You cannot compensate for slowness with the strength of your legs. You cannot create a safe distance with a single quick step. When you are behind on points, you are forced to advance into a space the opponent has prepared to receive you, and you are forced to do it with your hands — the only weapon the rules allow you to use to score. In the quarter-final against Zhadrayev of Kazakhstan, Kusaka trailed 9-4. He scored two consecutive step-out points and two exposure points, forming a run of six unanswered points, to end the match at 11-9. A step-out is when you force an opponent out of the mat area, worth one point. An exposure is when you turn an opponent's back to the mat, worth two points. Those six points alone are enough to show something: Kusaka, when driven to the wall, still has the ability to finish a match at the highest level. Based on my experience following matches, comebacks like that rarely come from a single miraculous move. They come from accumulation — one point at a time, one beat at a time, until the opponent realises the tide has turned without anyone naming the moment. In Greco-Roman, where you cannot use your legs for momentum, that accumulation must come from something else: alertness in every second, and the ability to endure pressure without making a mistake. But the very way Kusaka won the quarter-final is what makes the final worth reflecting on. Because to turn 9-4 into 11-9, he had to pay a price. Not a technical price, but a price in physical and mental reserves. A comeback does not only burn calories. It burns focus, it burns emotion, and it leaves a trace in the body that only shows up in the next match. And the final showed it. Kusaka let Abdevali score first. He fell behind early, at the very moment when in the quarter-final he had let Zhadrayev score first. This repetition is not random. It is a pattern. And in a final, where even two early points are enough to shape the entire match, that pattern became the precondition for defeat. What is notable is that in the final, Kusaka did not lose his technical ability. He still defended solidly, still produced moments that made the crowd hold its breath. But he could not reproduce the comeback of the quarter-final. The 5-2 score reflects a simple reality: when you fall behind early in a match where the opponent is prepared to protect an advantage, the gap to overturn is no longer six points — it is an entire match. There is another detail in the quarter-final that I consider more important than all the rest: the video challenge system. Zhadrayev lodged a challenge against the final exposure call. The challenge failed, and under the rules, a failed challenge awarded Kusaka an extra point. That point did not merely raise the score. It ended the bout. This is a mechanism that can decide a result by the smallest margin — not by technical superiority, but by an administrative decision. I have witnessed similar moments in football, where VAR changes the course of a match within seconds. And each time, I ask myself: are we watching sport, or are we watching a trial held on the field? The answer is not simple. But what is certain is that in the case of Kusaka and Zhadrayev, the line between winning and losing was so thin that a video referee's decision could redraw the entire story. I recall something I once heard from an old coach in Europe: a match does not end when the whistle sounds, but when people understand why they won or lost. For Kusaka, the moment of understanding perhaps came a little later. It came when he sat in the press conference, looked straight at the reporters, and said he was weak. It must be said clearly: that sentence is not an objective truth. It is an interpretation. And that is precisely the point I want to linger on a little longer, because a great misunderstanding is forming around this result. The misunderstanding is this: Kusaka is declining. That a silver medal at the Asian Games, for an Olympic champion, is a sign of decline. That he has passed his peak. That this is the beginning of an end. The data does not support that. Kusaka is twenty-five this year. In wrestling, twenty-five is the peak phase of a career — mature enough to understand tactics, young enough to endure brutal training loads, and experienced enough to know how to handle big matches. He is not on the far side of the slope. He is at the top. Kusaka's problem is not skill. It is his start-of-bout rhythm. He let opponents score first in both the quarter-final and the final. That is a pattern that can be exploited, and may have been exploited deliberately. In the final, Abdevali's two early points most likely came from an early par-terre or an exposure sequence — a sign that the Iranian coaching staff had studied this weakness of Kusaka carefully. This is what the media often overlooks when writing about defeat. They focus on the result, on the medal, on who won and who lost. But Kusaka's defeat does not lie in the result. It lies in the first seconds of each match — the interval the audience usually does not notice, because nothing has happened yet. It is precisely in that interval where nothing happens that the match is decided. I once sat in the Hongkou corridor and learned that the most important moments are often the silent ones. People remember the goal in the eighty-eighth minute, but forget the passage of play in the third minute that created that goal. People remember the decisive throw, but forget the moment of lost balance two seconds earlier that opened the way for it. With Kusaka, that silent moment was the opening seconds — where he lost points without anyone noting them in the record. Here, I want to return to a personal story. In 2026, in Volgograd, I stood at the end of the mixed zone waiting for Harry Kane to pass by. He had just been through a tiring match, had just missed a penalty. When he saw me standing quietly, he stopped for about forty seconds and said something that at first sounded clichéd: The first goal was down to my teammates, not me. But in the context of having just missed a penalty, that sentence became something else. Kane said one honest sentence in Volgograd, and I understood why I do this job. What I learned from Kane is: a sentence only means something when it is placed in context. The same sentence, spoken at an ordinary press conference, would be a cliché. Spoken after a defeat, it becomes the truth. Kusaka's sentence — I was simply weak — is the same. If he had said it after a victory, people would have taken it as humility. Spoken after a final defeat, before a home crowd, it becomes a worrying psychological signal. And here is the counter-intuitive point I want to raise: that sentence may not reflect the truth about Kusaka's fitness or technique, but rather his mental state at that moment. An athlete who has just lost at home, before a home crowd, after setting himself a standard higher than even a gold medal, tends to punish himself harshly. That is a natural psychological reaction, not a technical assessment. But if it drags on, it can become a real risk. An athlete who loses confidence after defeat may enter the next tournament with a different mindset — and at the highest level, where the gap between athletes is measured in the smallest percentages, mentality is what decides. I have seen many talented athletes never return after a defeat they could not explain. Kusaka can explain his defeat — but the way he explains it is more worrying than the defeat itself. There is one comfort: Kusaka is not alone. In the same session, Yuri Nakazato won gold in the 97kg Greco-Roman. And the way he won it is even more notable than the gold Kusaka would have won if he had. Nakazato stepped onto the podium with a limping gait. He had a leg injury — the exact extent was not clearly announced, but the image of him hobbling onto the highest step of the podium was one of the most shared images of that day. He defeated Siwach of India in the final. And afterwards, he told the press he had never imagined he could win. That is a notable sentence for several reasons. First, it shows Nakazato did not enter the tournament as the favourite. Second, it freed him from pressure — an athlete who does not expect much of himself will not be paralysed by the fear of failure. And third, it raises a question: if Nakazato could win when he did not believe he could, what stopped Kusaka from winning when he believed he had to? The answer perhaps lies in the very difference between those two psychological stances. Kusaka entered with a burden. Nakazato entered with relief. And in elite sport, the burden is often the heaviest thing an athlete carries, heavier than any injury. I do not want to romanticise Nakazato's injury. An injury is an injury, and it can affect an athlete's career in unpredictable ways. The fact is that Nakazato competed with an undetermined leg injury, and that poses a risk to his availability in the near term. A gold today does not guarantee an intact career tomorrow. That is something anyone who has followed sport long enough knows. But on that day, Nakazato did what Kusaka could not: he overcame his own circumstances. And perhaps that is what elite sport always reminds us — that sometimes the winner is not the strongest, but the one least hindered by himself. On the same day, in the women's freestyle 62kg, Ozaki won gold after defeating Kim in the final. This was another victory for Japan, and it helped soften the disappointment of Kusaka's silver. Three golds in a single day — one in the 97kg Greco-Roman, one in the women's 62kg freestyle, along with other achievements — confirmed Japan's standing as a wrestling power of the continent. What is notable is the diversity of these golds. Japan is not strong in just one branch. They are strong in both men's Greco-Roman and women's freestyle. That is the sign of a systematic development model — one that does not depend on a few talented individuals, but rests on a sustainable training structure. I once wrote about teams that disappeared but still quietly exist. I once sat in the kitchen of a team that no longer had any players, where an old chef still cooked forty-five portions of rice every day. Old Chau's ghost team still eats hot rice, in the lonely cold of Shanghai. And I learned that the true strength of an organisation does not lie in its stars, but in the people who keep the machine running when no one is watching. Japan, in wrestling, appears to have built such a machine. The emergence of names like Nakazato and Ozaki — people who may not be the brightest stars but still win gold — is evidence of a system with depth. When a team or a delegation has depth, an individual's failure is no longer a disaster. It is just a variable in a larger equation. That means Japan can absorb Kusaka's silver without worrying about a crisis. But it also means Kusaka will have to bear the pressure alone. When the whole delegation succeeds, individual failure becomes lonelier. No one blames the system, because the system has done its job. Only the individual must face the question: why not me? And that is why Kusaka's sentence — I was simply weak — deserves us to linger longer. It is not an excuse, nor a surrender. It is a way for an athlete to set a starting point for the next time. Because sometimes, to begin again, one must admit one is at the lowest point. But if we stop there, we will miss something more important. We will miss asking: is Kusaka really weak, or did he simply meet an opponent better prepared on a day when nothing went his way? This is where I want to push back against the popular way of telling the story of defeat. The media tends to turn every defeat into a moral tale: the winner is someone with good qualities, the loser is someone lacking some quality. It is an appealing way of telling a story, because it is simple and gives the audience a clear lesson. But it is often wrong. In Kusaka's case, the moral tale would be: he lost confidence, he was no longer himself, he is finished. But the data from the match itself tells another story. He overturned a quarter-final from 9-4 to 11-9 against a world-class opponent. That is not the behaviour of someone finished. It is the behaviour of someone who still has enough skill and courage to do something extraordinary — but who exposed a specific weakness at a specific moment. The difference between these two readings is huge. If Kusaka is finished, he needs a comprehensive rebuild, which may be unfeasible. If Kusaka simply has one specific problem — his start-of-bout rhythm — he needs only one specific solution. And specific solutions are usually within reach. There is another point I want to raise, and it concerns how we watch sport itself. We tend to see a match as a confrontation between two individuals, and the result as a judgment on their worth. But in reality, a match is a confrontation between two preparation systems. Abdevali's victory is not just Abdevali's victory. It is the victory of a training programme that studied Kusaka carefully, identified his weakness, and built a plan to exploit it. In football, we see this more clearly. A team can win not because they have better players, but because their coach read the match better. That is why I am always cautious with stories about individuals. An individual can shine, but behind every shining individual is a collective that worked to create the conditions for that light. With Kusaka, this means: if he lost because of a specific weakness, that weakness can be fixed. And if it is fixed, he can return. That is a far more positive prospect than the story of decline. Of course, fixing a weakness is never as simple as saying it. Start-of-bout rhythm is a complex issue. It may relate to warm-up, to focus, to how an athlete handles the pressure of the first seconds. It may relate to opponents having studied him and found a way to exploit it. And it may relate to a deeper psychological factor — the fear of winning, or the fear of losing. At Kusaka's level, such problems usually cannot be solved by technical training alone. They need intervention at the psychological and tactical level. And that means Kusaka, if he wants to return, will have to face himself in a way different from before. That is why I believe his sentence in the press conference — I was simply weak — may be a good beginning. Not because it is correct, but because it is honest. An athlete who admits his weakness is an athlete who has set foot on the road to repair. An athlete who denies his weakness is an athlete who will never fix it. But I also want to warn of another risk. Self-criticism can be a tool, but it can also be a trap. If Kusaka turns it into a habit — if he punishes himself after every defeat — he will gradually erode his own confidence. And confidence, at the highest level, is a resource as precious as fitness or skill. I have seen this in football. Talented players can collapse not because they lose their skill, but because they lose the belief that their skill can make a difference. And once that belief disappears, regaining it is far harder than learning a new technique. So what will happen to Kusaka? That is a question no one can answer right now. But there are a few signals we can track. The first signal is how he returns in the next tournament. If he starts better — if he does not let opponents score first in the opening seconds — that is a sign he has addressed the start-of-bout issue. If the old pattern repeats, that is a sign the problem is deeper and needs a different solution. The second signal is how he talks about himself. If he continues to criticise himself harshly, that may be a sign of a prolonged psychological issue. If he shifts to an analytical attitude — talking about what specifically did not work, rather than about his own weakness — that is a sign he has begun the process of repair. The third signal is Nakazato's health. If his injury forces him to rest for a while, Japan will lose a pillar, and the pressure on Kusaka will rise. If Nakazato recovers well, he can continue to be a source of strength for the delegation. But perhaps the most important signal is none of these. It is something we cannot observe from the outside: whether Kusaka learns to read his defeat as data, rather than as a verdict. Because in elite sport, the difference between a great athlete and a good athlete is not whether they fail — everyone fails. It is how they read that failure. I have followed sport for more than thirty years. I have seen great athletes fail in the most brutal ways, and I have seen them return. What I learned is: failure does not define a career. How people respond to failure defines it. And in Kusaka's case, his first response — however painful — was an honest one. He did not blame the referee. He did not blame injury. He did not blame circumstances. He took responsibility. That is a response I respect, even as I worry about the psychological price it may cost. The good reporter is not the one who arrives early, but the one who stays last. I stayed last that evening, when the arena had emptied, when the other reporters had left to write their pieces. I stayed, and I saw Kusaka come out of the dressing room, alone, with his bag on his shoulder. He walked past the press area without looking over. But there was a moment when he paused, looked up at the scoreboard still showing the score, and nodded — as if he were committing that number to memory, not to blame himself, but to write it in his book. That was the moment I understood something. In sport, we tend to think of winning and losing as two opposing states. But in reality, they are two points on the same line. And what matters is not which point you are at, but which direction you are moving. With Kusaka, the direction is not yet determined. He can go up, or he can go down. But one thing is certain: he will not stand still. No one at his level can stand still. I left the Aichi-Nagoya arena close to midnight. The city was still lit. I thought about Kusaka, about Nakazato with his limping gait on the podium, about Ozaki and her victory. I thought about all the people I have met in my career — those who won, those who lost, and those still somewhere in between. And I thought about something I have always believed: sport is not a story about numbers. It is a story about people trying to overcome their own limits. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they do not. But the moment they try — the moment they put everything into a single effort — that is what deserves to be recorded. Kusaka had that moment in the quarter-final, when he turned 9-4 into 11-9. And he did not have it in the final. But he still has a chance to have it again, in the future. And that is the most important thing a twenty-five-year-old athlete can have: a future to try again. The question is not whether Kusaka can win again. The question is: can he learn to start better, so that moments of comeback are no longer a precondition for his victories? Because an athlete cannot always overturn the situation. There will be days when the situation will not allow it. And on those days, the only thing you can rely on is how you begin. From Volgograd to Shanghai, I learned that football lives in the silences. And in Aichi-Nagoya, I learned one more thing: in wrestling, as in life, defeat often lies in the first seconds — the interval no one notices, because nothing has happened yet. That interval is exactly where the match is truly decided.