Back in the early ’90s, in France they had the brilliant idea of starting a game show called “Fort Boyard”. It was set in an ancient fort off the French coast. Each week a group of contestants had to go through various challenges and my favorite one was called “Mud Wrestler”.
You guess it, there was some mud wrestling going on. The contestant had to try grabbing a key hanging from the ceiling in a room with a muddy floor, while a woman wrestler was trying to stop her. You could find some good fighting at times, since the contestants were quite eager to pass the challenge.
The show went on for years and was exported in many other countries too. It’s probably an ancestor of “Fear Factor”, except that the US show focuses more on eating or touching awful stuff and they seldom have games were there is a direct physical confrontation.
It looks like anything liquid or slippery will do. Not it’s Margarita time. It also looks like it was not the real drink, otherwise the fighters would have got too drunk.
This is what I consider a negative example: a good wrestling event (probably, from other clips I’ve seen) turned into useless stuff after TV editing. We see the host, a lot of computer graphics but very little wrestling, edited in 2-second fragments so you can’t see any action.
Is Britney Spears really fighting here ? Well, no. The setting would be right, the attire is appropriate, but she ends up singing instead of wrestling.
But the famous Pepsi advertisement is another proof that most people like seeing beautiful women in a combat/fighting situation. Good cast and good filming, they just needed a different writer who dared to choose a catfighting finale !
Women’s freestyle wrestling was featured at the Olympic Games in Beijing last summer. It was a great opportunity for watching some competitive female wrestling in a true sporting environment. The point system used in freestyle wrestling may be a bit tricky to understand for people new to the sport, but the sight of two highly skilled athletes in a competitive bout should not be missed.
The real problem was being able to watch it ! During the Olympic Games the TV coverage was quite poor. The main networks were focusing on more popular sports, including the ones we can see every week on air. It may have been more interesting to focus on sports we can see every four years only !
In some cases it was possible to watch streaming versions of the competitions on the Internet, a simple way to bypass the limits imposed by the small number of channels used by broadcasters. But there were several restrictions imposed by the Olympic Committee, so each country had different sources and a different way to watch our favorite sport. Right now there are no recordings easily available: either you saw it live or… you missed it.
This is Carol Huynh (Canada), winner in the 48Kg category.
Women wrestling comes from eastern Europe too. Some video productions features some aggressive fighting, helped by lower costs and the fact that many women over there still prefer to spend their free time training and practicing sports rather than going shopping. DWW‘s women are an example.
Here’s something different, a mud wrestling show from Ukraine. This is just a promo, so you see short sequences only, heavily edited. The girls are attractive and the setup is professional. The action is not what I really like to see. I’d call it “jump and fly”: the fighters are moving around too much, with plenty of jumps and throws. It’s not what you see in a competitive match, but it’s still nice to watch and it’s something that can appeal to big crowds, like disco shows or cable TV broadcasts.
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