Ivan BOHDAN:"In my time, if a wrestler careless, he was beaten"

On an unusual Thursday like this, The Day correspondents met the organizer of these informal get-togethers of veteran wrestlers Ivan Bohdan and asked him to recall his younger years.

"Were you ordered to take up wrestling?"

"Yes, when I was drafted into the army in 1950, the local bosses at once set an eye on me and sent me to the gymnasium. I was almost 190 cm tall. I had worked on a collective farm since I was a small boy, doing any hard work I was told to. So in the army, they exempted me from daily drills so I could train and defend the honor of our military district on the mat in the heavyweight category.

"Like hell I will, I thought. My father never ate such bread and neither will I. And, instead of training in the gymnasium, I would go to the movies or simply roam around Dnipropetrovsk where I lived at the time. I would miss every other training session. Briefly, I went to a Kyiv tournament like a stupid ox, knowing nothing. The boys showed me techniques right in the railway car."

"And what do you remember most from your first appearance on the Kyiv mat? Were you scared?"

"Oh, nothing special at all. I was ashamed. Morals were strict in my native village: it was unthinkable to walk around in underwear in your own yard, let alone in the street! And here is the capital and lots of girls among the audience. This was perhaps the factor why I wound up second in the tournament."

"But, further on, everything became clear: you tasted victory, and we were told that the soldiers' mess sergeant was ordered to feed Ivan Bohdan all he wanted. So you got to like wrestling."

"Well, I never liked it."

"This is fantastic. Not to like what brought you fame as a twice world and Olympic champion? Incredible!"

"I have already said: I was forced to wrestle. The army is the army. One is detailed to KP and peel potatoes, another, sorry, to dig latrines, and I was sent to the mat. This was routine work for me, which I tried to do honestly."

"Were you soon invited to the USSR national team only for such diligence?"

"No, this was akin to hazing in the army. I was taken there to be a beanbag. In those times there were no big stuffed dolls for the wrestlers to try out their throws on. So I became a living beanbag for team leaders Oleksandr Mazur and Johannes Kotkas.

"The former had been wrestling in a circus for a long time. Never before and after did I see a rubber boy like that! He would press into you his belly, sending my feet up to the ceiling, then he would bend over backwards, reach my legs with the back of his head, turn over and throw all his body on me. He had first won the European championship back in 1934 and bagged the World Cup twenty years later. He was also a unique person. Weighing 120 kg, he would easily walk on his hands. So they would throw me around like a beanbag. Every time I went to the mat as if it were the gallows: I don't know what would have been the end of it - by all accounts, this pair could have broken my neck or my back. But I was taught one counter-technique..."

"According to your friends, you didn't have a master-strike technique, but the whole arsenal of them was stunningly large. Many well-known wrestlers even complained: you can't possibly find a key to Bohdan, he's always different, you never know what he will do."

"One can always get used to a standard and traditional action trained to automatic perfection. But it made no difference to me whether to throw opponents to the left or right. And this worried them."

"You were born February 29, i.e., you can only mark your birthday in a year of Olympic Games. So it was decreed by fate: to give yourself a precious gift in one of these years?"

"In general, I thought it over and concluded, why not? I can't forget that win in Rome, for it cost me so much effort! Take, for instance, the bout with the first Olympic and world champion Wilfried Dietrich from West Germany. Everybody called him the king of wrestling. And he really was. It's no laughing matter: Dietrich took part in eight wrestling tournaments and five Olympics both in free and Greco-Roman styles. Can one possibly forget his fantastic victory over the American super-giant Chris Taylor who was 195 cm tall and weighed 200 kg? While Dietrich, like me, was a little over 100 kg. So the comparatively diminutive Wilfried carried out what was later called the throw of the century: he hurled the American over himself, staying in a bent-over-backward position. Imagine what would have been left of the German if the throw had failed and the 200 kg. landed on him. And how did he hug the rival? I once tried to do so, but my hands failed to meet around Taylor's waist.

"So I wrestled Dietrich in Rome. I gripped him and he me, we spun off like a top and flew to the mat's edges. And then I jumped and made an eight-meter swan dive in the air and came down on top of him. They asked whether the guy was crazy."

"Today Ukraine has almost forgotten about victories in the most prestigious weight category."

"Little wonder. Our present-day heavyweights are straightforward. They push around, rather than wrestle. One of them will gain a point by the grace of God and immediately retreat to deep defense without even imitating wrestling."

"Add to this that in your times a bout lasted 20 minutes and now only 5."

"We didn't even occur to us to mark time or relax. Aram Yaltyrian would sometimes spin such a whirl that he won up to 50 points. Not a minute of rest. If you relaxed, you were eaten alive. This is what Oleksandr Medvid did, for example. But today coaches drool over weak athletes, trying to get off with little blood."

"You now head the Kyiv Association of Sports Veterans. You still can't calm down."

"And who will help the people who sacrificed their health for sport, but the state left them empty-handed, thus thanking them for their victories and records? Whoever seriously practiced sports knows what kind of an excruciating job it is. I am perhaps well-off with my military pension, but there are champions who really are eking out a miserable existence. This is why we set up this organization and started commercial activity. For example, today we grant money to those in especially dire straits, about fifty people: 50 hryvnias a month. It is like in wrestling: if you dodge and relax, you'll be eaten alive, and I don't want that at all!"