Daughter of Israeli immigrant athletes, 20, becomes the youngest ever American gold medalist in wrestling, keeping a five-year winning streak going by defeating Kyrgyz opponent.
Wrestler Amit Elor will leave the Paris Olympics unbeaten.

Elor, a Jewish athlete and daughter of Israeli immigrants who relocated to the US to train, won the gold medal 3-0 over Kyrgyzstan’s Meerim Zhumanazarova, extending her five-year winning streak.
With the triumph, Elor, 20, becomes the youngest US gold winner in wrestling history.

It also means that she joins a small group of other Jewish wrestlers who have won gold medals on the mat. Károly Kárpáti of Hungary won gold in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin; he was later imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and witnessed the death of gold medalist fencer Attila Petschauer, but he survived.

In 1948, Henry Wittenberg won gold for the United States after damaging tendons in an earlier fight. He later helped launch Israel’s Maccabiah Games and coached wrestling at Yeshiva University. The annual national Jewish high school wrestling competition carries his name.

Elor, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Israel, faced both online antisemitism and the untimely deaths of her father and brother during her rise to the top echelons of US women’s wrestling.

She competes in the 68-kilogram weight class and, in October, became the youngest American wrestler, male or female, to win a senior world title.
“It killed me at the time that he didn’t see that,” she added, referring to her father, Yair Elor. “He would have been so proud.”

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