Even though when most of us think of wrestling nowadays we think about the flashing lights, the entrance music and the best entertainers in the world putting on a great show for us, wrestling wasn’t always like this. Believe it or not, there are some drawings in caves in France that are thousands of years old that have drawings of people wrestling, so it’s definitely not one of the newest sports that are around! There aren’t many sports that we have information about that are go back so far in time, but wrestling is one of them.

Humble beginnings

Although we all think that wrestling is a sport now, when it first started it wasn’t really regarded as a sport. Nobody knows for sure how or why people started to wrestle all those years ago, but we’re pretty sure that wrestling didn’t just happen in one or two places around the globe, it was international - and not in the sense that it could be viewed on television all over the world, televisions weren’t invented thousands of years ago!

Using wrestling to settle a problem

The great thing about wrestling is that since people wrestled all around the world, every culture had a different way of doing it. For example: Different rules and different ways of winning the fight. The one thing that all of these cultures had in common though was that wrestling was mainly chosen as the way in which people could compete against each other. So if there were any disagreements between people, wrestling was usually the way that people sorted out their differences.

It’s not hard to see why wrestling became so popular thousands of years ago, since back then people didn’t have many other things to do other than fight and so on. There’s a high chance that wrestling was actually the very first organised competition invented by man. Other competitive sports that we are so used to today such as soccer, rugby and so on weren’t around back then, so it’s no wonder why wrestling caught on so quickly.

Greeks & Romans

It’s believed that the Greeks and the Romans were passionate about wrestling. Wrestling was even used in the Olympics but it was extremely brutal in comparison to how wrestling is today. It’s interesting though, since many of the moves that are used today in WWE and TNA wrestling were used by the Greeks and the Romans in the past, but there are obviously a lot more rules today than there were back then.

Wrestling as a sport

A long time later, wrestling became more of a sport in the United States after many English people that were involved with wrestling moved over to the US. Amateur wrestling suddenly became a lot of Americans favourite pastimes not long later.

The first official wrestling tournament was then hosted in New York in the late 19th century and ever since then its popularity has continued to grow. Today, wrestling fans travel all over the world to see their favourite wrestlers in the flesh, with some wrestling events such as WrestleMania III with a massive attendance of over 93,000 people!