Sebastian Rivera's Wild Path To Gold At The Matteo Pellicone
Sebastian Rivera's Wild Path To Gold At The Matteo Pellicone
A summary of Sebastian Rivera's run to gold at the 2022 Matteo Pellicone.
Sebastian Rivera had an incredible tournament at the 2022 Matteo Pellicone with three, thrilling victories. Take a look below for a complete summary of his outstanding performance in Italy.
Wrestling for Puerto Rico, Sebastian Rivera opened up his tournament with a quarterfinal match against Turkey’s Hamza Alaca - a 2018 cadet world champ, this year’s U23 European bronze medalist, and the runner-up at last year’s Turkish national tournament. Rivera got out to a great start against Alaca building a 6-0 lead on two takedowns and an exposure. However, Alaca responded with two takedowns of his own to close the gap to 6-4 at the break. In the second, Rivera scored 1 point on a fleeing the mat call before Alaca responded with a 4-point move to take the 8-7. Alaca didn’t hold the lead for long as Rivera immediately secured a reversal and transitioned to a gut wrench to take the lead outright - 10-8. Rivera defended well the remainder of the match to secure the victory and move onto the semi-finals.
Scoring highlight of Rivera’s win over Alaca:
Rivera’s semi-final bout was against Shamil Omarov - a Russian transfer now representing Italy. In their match, Omarov got out to an early lead with a beautiful four-point throw just a minute into the match. Rivera was unable to get any offense going until under 10 seconds left in the bout when he answered with a 4-point throw of his own to go up on criteria - 4-4. With only 5 seconds left, Omarov needed a takedown to win and scored with 1 second left on the clock. However, the time didn’t start running until about 6 seconds after the ref blew his whistle. After a challenge, the mistake was corrected and Rivera was deemed the victor!
Scoring highlight of Rivera’s win over Omarov:
Rivera’s gold medal bout was against the formidable Erik Arushanian (UKR). Arushanian is one of Ukraine’s best, young prospects and was a junior world champion in 2019 and won a U23 European title in 2021. In their finals match, Rivera fell behind early surrendering a 4-point throw 30 seconds into the bout and another takedown a minute later to go down 6-0. Rivera responded emphatically scoring two takedowns and two gut wrenches to take an 8-6 lead into the break. In the second period, Rivera stayed on his offense with another takedown to a gut wrench but gave up a reversal - giving him a 12-7 lead. River took further control with a takedown 30 seconds later to extend his lead to 14-7 with just 2 minutes remaining in the match. Arushanian was only able to score a single takedown in the final minute, leaving Sebastian Rivera the winner by a final score of 14-9.
Scoring highlight of Rivera’s win over Arushanian:
Sebastian Rivera’s full results and links to full matches:
This tournament was Sebastian Rivera's best international showing and his first-ever gold on the senior level. Rivera will represent Puerto Rico at this year's world championships in September and, if he wrestles as he did in Italy, he'll be a threat to challenge for a medal in Serbia at worlds.