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.

Source: Wikipedia

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.

Visit the Margarita Wrestling web site, it has better previews !

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.

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.

It’s a TV show called “Gintarine Ledi “, shot a few years ago in Lithuania. Later on it was dubbed in English (more or less) and broadcasted in other countries as “Amber Lady“. The girls are very attractive and some of them wrestle with some energy. So we have the right ingredients: slim and fit women wearing a bikini, messy wrestling in honey, broadcast-level photography (well, maybe not on the web) and sometimes competitive action. Maybe not top athletes in 100% competition, but all of them doing some good efforts for pinning their opponent and winning the match !

Sources: I would love to find a good official source, selling the full show in DVD quality. I could not find any. If you know where to buy the Amber Lady matches, just let me know !

This is a clip of water wrestling or so…