2010 World Championships

Coaches Apprentice Program (Day 1)

Cody Bickley collected the coaches participating in the Coaches Apprentice Program (CAP) at Gate 8 in Terminal 3 of JFK Airport in New York.  Cody manages the National Coaches Education Program for USAW.  The coaches arrived from all over – Florida, Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, Montana, Colorado, California, and Hawaii.

The CAP provides coaches the chance for professional growth with field experience on an international tour with the U.S. team.  This year’s tour is to the 2010 World Championships in Moscow, Russia.  CAP coaches must have attended a USA Wrestling Silver College within the NCEP program, and must be progressing toward a Silver or Gold level certification.

The non-stop, packed-to-the-gills flight from JFK left at 4:10 p.m. on Saturday, September 4 and touched down three movies and two bad meals later in Moscow exactly on time on Sunday, September 5, at 10:10 a.m.  We cleared customs, collected our bags and headed out in search of our shuttle.  We walked right by the beautiful blond girl with a poorly written magic marker sign.  As we passed, she hurried up to Michael Stokes from Montana and asked, “American?  American?” and then, through half-English and gestures, told us that she had a 15 passenger van for the 19 of us who had just arrived.  The chosen 15 wedged into the van with suitcases filling the aisle and stacked in the doorway.  The van came back for the others later.

The previous day Mitch Hull, the Director of National Teams, had e-mailed us about the 1 ½ hour commute from the airport but even though the heavy traffic seemed to be without fixed rules and the roads are either under construction or should be, we arrived at the Cosmos Hotel in less than an hour.  Check in was longer.

The huge, half-circle hotel opened in 1979, “intended” as it says on its website, “for catering to the XXII Moscow Olympics.”  It faces the V.V.C., All-Russia Exhibition Centre and the Space Explorers Monument.   A giant bronze statue of Charles de Gaulle stands at attention in the majestic granite staircase that rises from the main road to the port cochere (the majesty somewhat marred by the gaggle of 13-year old skate boarders who practice tricks with cigarettes dangling in the corners of their mouths). At night, the skate boarders are gone and thousands of small lights blink like stars all across the front of the 25-story hotel. 

It supposedly takes 15 – 20 minutes to get from hotel to the sporting venue.  After lunch some CAP coaches went to the venue to watch wrestlers cutting weight and going through light pre-competition workouts.  Cody led the rest of us into Moscow to see Red Square.  With no map.  With no directions.  With no one who spoke Russian or read Cyrillic.  Yankee wrestlers are fearless.

We walked underneath the highway that fronts the hotel to get to the BOHX (closest spelling possible) subway station.  Unable to make the middle-aged lady selling tickets understand where we wanted to go, we resorted to pointing at our Team USA warm up jackets and then touching our forefingers to our thumbs.  It was great fun.  Once she realized that we wanted to go to Red Square, we made a back & forth arching movement with our forefinger and she nodded, handing us magnetic cards, good for a round trip.  At least by pantomiming we didn’t resort to the classic American tourist device of slowing down our questions in English and raising our voices.

Tickets purchased, we followed the fast moving ranks through the glass doors and onto the faster moving escalator that took us at least 10 stories underground.  A kind guard told us to go down and turn right.  We did and caught the first speeding train through the terminal.  There, another kind Russian passenger pointed out where we wanted to go on the subway map mounted on the wall by the sliding doors.  It involved a train change.  When we tried to change trains we got to explore the stairs and walkways at the exchange point for about 10 minutes before a third kind person altered his own travel plans and actually rode with us to the right station.  Still, even he was not quite sure where to go and he called a friend who spoke English.  When Cody took the phone to talk with her she said, “Get off!  You are there.” 

And we were.  As we walked out of the subway and turned around, we saw the front gate of the Kremlin.  Thousands of people walked around in Red Square.  Vendors sold soda and ice cream.  A concert given by military bands caused the Kremlin to be closed to tourists so we walked the perimeter counter-clockwise.  We joined the thousands of people strolling through the Alexandrovsky Gardens, stopped to watch the stoic guards on either side of the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, watched six young men doing a combination of acrobatics, capoeira, and submission grappling on the grass, and walked obliviously by the obelisk that marks the Monument to Revolutionary Thinkers.

The Kremlin’s west wall is a massive red brick structure behind which stand honey-mustard buildings, one of which the guidebook says is the Poteshny Palace.  We walked the south wall that faces the Moscow River and we saw the onion domes, some a shining gold, that give the Kremlin its distinctive look.  Soldiers leaning casually on barricades blocked our walk along the east wall and we missed much of Red Square as we detoured around St. Basil’s Cathedral, its onion domes and spires looking like a variety of large and small Dairy Queen cones dipped in swirls of gold, orange, red, green, and blue.

Cody led us back to the subway station for the not-nearly-so-unnerving ride back to the hotel.  Matt Hampton from Illinois wouldn’t let the fun end so soon though.  We were all thirsty and he’d heard rumors of cheap beer at the carnival in the garden near the All Russia Exhibition Centre.  All the people in Moscow who weren’t walking in Red Square or strolling through the Alexandrovsky Gardens were going to or were already at the carnival.  We wound through the crowd and under the arches that mark the entrance.  We resisted having our pictures taken with a dressed up monkey on a motor scooter (think Marcel from Friends).  We watched 4 Burmese pythons slowly unwind on a stretch of grass while little kids knelt close to see the huge snakes better.  We watched out-of-control Go Cart racers with bumper car fenders speed around a tire-lined track at full-throttle – a place of probable return.  And we had a tepid cheap beer before heading to the hotel.

Tomorrow we catch the 10:30 a.m. shuttle to the venue to learn how to use the cameras and to get our filming assignments.  Competition starts at 1:00 p.m. and we’ll be filming every match on all three mats for quick downloading into a computer where the footage will be digested, cut, and reassembled by others so as to be available to the athletes and the coaches preparing for their next match.  Our credentials also allow us into the warm up areas and that’s a wonderful place to watch the world’s best wrestlers as they prepare physically and mentally for the most important tournament of the year.