Women of Wrestling
Saunders joined Helen of Troy as pioneers to sport
Tricia Saunders and Helen of Troy.
What could Tricia, an attractive blonde who today lives in Phoenix, Ariz., have in common with Helen of Troy, the Spartan queen who was so beautiful that the legendary Trojan War was supposedly fought over her some 3,000 years ago?
How about the sport of wrestling as the common link!
Tricia is America’s best-known woman wrestler, with four world gold medals and one silver. Incredibly, she never lost to an American woman during her entire career and won 11 national championships. Next June, she will add to her long list of credentials when she becomes the first woman to be inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
Most Americans, who follow the sport, know about Tricia’s accomplishments and those of her husband, Townsend, who owns a silver medal from the 1996 Olympics and two national freestyle titles. But hardly anyone in America knows that women’s wrestling actually dates back over 3,000 years … and that it can be traced to the era of Helen of Troy.
Readers of this column know I love history in general and the era of the ancient Greeks in particular. I majored in history in college and have carried a deep affection for the subject ever since I was a youth growing up in Waterloo, Iowa.
Last year I wrote an historical novel about Achilles, the greatest warrior in all of Greek literature, and explained that Achilles was a wrestler. It seems only natural that a great warrior 3,000 years ago would have been a wrestler, as wrestling was a perfe
ct way to train soldiers and warriors for battle, making them physically and mentally tough and teaching essential fighting skills.Achilles gained his immortal fame fighting at the Trojan War, and so I am always interested in reading anything that has to do with the war at Troy. When browsing at a Barnes and Noble bookstore recently, I was delighted to find a new book entitled “Helen of Troy.”
I bought it in
| Tricia Saunders won five world and 11 national titles between 1990 and 2001. |
BEFORE RUNNING off to Troy with prince Paris, Helen was born and raised in Sparta. It has always had a reputation for being the most war-like of the Greek city-states, and physical training was taken to the highest levels there. The Spartans were obsessed with physical beauty, military training and sports.
And the women were part of that combative culture, according to author Bettany Hughes, a scholar who has spent decades studying this period. Here’s what the author has to write in the book “Helen of Troy”:
“Homer first describes Sparta as ‘the land of beautiful women,’ an epithet almost certainly inspired by Helen’s example. It was said that physical beauty was admired in Sparta above all other attributes.
“In pursuit of physical perfection, Spartan women had the advantage over their Athenian counterparts. Unlike Athenians, Spartan girls were given the same food rations as the boys and were allowed to drink unwatered wine. Adolescent girls were subject to strict training regime that made them every bit as fit as their brothers and boy-cousins.
“Classical sources list as part of a girl’s education racing, wrestling, throwing the discus and javelin and trials of strength.”
Later, when talking about the athletic contests in Sparta, Hughes writes that “one Spartan girl was imported to Rome to grapple in public with a Roman senator.”
There are other sources for women wrestling in antiquity. The famed poet Ovid wrote about a young Spartan princess wrestling in the palestra. And the Roman poet Propertius wrote thusly:
“There (in Sparta), a young woman properly exercises her body in physical sports, wrestling with the young men, throwing a ball too fast for them to catch, spinning a nifty hoop; or at length stands panting, matted with the mud of the wrestling floor, bruised in the rough pancration …”
Apparently women were not only wrestling 3000 years ago, but they were also participating in pancration, the brutal sport that combined wrestling and boxing!
Further evidence cropped up from another source. In the book “How Did Sports Begin,” author R. Brasch spends considerable space talking about wrestling in ancient Greece.
At one point, he writes: “Some states included women as wrestlers and even permitted them to compete with men.”
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