Producer and Director of Olympic Chanel Story:
World Champion Reza Yazdani's Fight for the Olympics
Two-time freestyle wrestling world champion Reza Yazdani has suffered a severe ankle injury during training on the eve of the Olympics.
Reza is considered one of the world’s greatest freestyle wrestlers but he has yet to achieve Olympic success. In 2012 at the London Olympic summer games he suffered a severe injury during the semi-finals and his hopes of
Olympic glory was lost.
Now, Reza is thirty-one years old and reaching the end of his career and the whole story is about his effort to overcome his injury and achieve his dreams at the Olympics.
Reza has a special fitness trainer who is very sensitive about his injury. We filmed him at the training before going to the city center to get the reaction of people recognizing him and asking to get selfies and autographs.
We had three sit-down interviews with Reza as he talked about his personal life, his love of wrestling, the whole story of the 2012 Olympics in London, and his bad luck of having back-to-back injuries ahead of the big tournaments.
We also filmed him with a bunch of wrestlers, wrestling and discussing techniques, as well as playing basketball together. At the end of the training, Reza started to wrestle with an opponent but in a dramatic scene he felt a lot of pressure on his injured ankle and he fell on the mat shouting in pain.
Reza Yazdani, who nicknamed ‘The Leopard of Juybar’, finally recovered in time to compete at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. He won his first match but his injury held him back as he knocked out in the round of 16 after suffering two defeats against Azerbaijan’s Khetag Gazyumov and Magomed Abdulmuminovich Ibragimov of Uzbekistan. He finished in the 7th spot.