The Summer Games once again brought together many disparate nations from across the globe to participate in the world's foremost sports festival. 

Notably absent from the list of the 60 nations that sent wrestling teams to Paris were Russia and Belarus. Without getting too deep into the background of that story, we'll simply note that the absence of wrestlers from those nations (save for two Belarussians who competed as 'neutral athletes'), is that we saw a more diverse set of medal winners than ever. 

One might think Bahrain and Albania winning men's freestyle medals in Paris for the first time in Olympic history means that global wrestling talent has spread out from its typical power base of southern Russia. But a glance at a map of the hometowns of all the men's freestyle medalists reveals that is not quite the case. 

Seven of 24 men's freestyle medals were earned by wrestlers from southern Russia, with three more coming from nearby Georgians. Four Iranian medalists form another cluster, while four Americans who made the Olympic podium form another cluster in the Northeast of the USA. Lastly, Japanese wrestlers earned three more medals while Uzbekistan, India, and Turkey can each boast one podium placer.

But how could that be when we all saw Bulgarian, Greek and Puerto Rican flags raised during the medal ceremonies -- as well as the aforementioned Bahrainian and Albanian flags? Because of transfers, naturally. 

Without transfers, six would be the most entries in men's freestyle any country could have. But when we create a map of all the men's freestyle participants in Paris, we can see that this is clearly not the case. 

Zooming in on the area around the Caucasus Mountains and the southern shore of the Caspian Sea will give us a closer view of the part of the globe most densely populated with wrestling talent. 

That's 33 out of 98 Olympians all packed into one region!

Here's that same (approximate) area but filtered to display only 2024 men's freestyle Olympic medalists. 

And of course, we have to have a heatmap. What would a blog post called, "Mapping The 2024 Paris Olympic Men's Freestyle Wrestlers' Hometowns" be without a heatmap?

The 'heat' in the map is being generated by hypothetical team points (there are no official team scores at the Olympics), so 25 points for gold, 20 for silver, 15 for bronze, all the way down to 2 points for 10th place. 

As these maps have all demonstrated, there is no higher concentration of freestyle wrestling talent than the Caucasus Mountain area. Even when Russia does not participate as a team, thanks to transfers, wrestlers from the Caucasus region of Russia still produced 15 Olympians and seven medalists, including three golds. 

This fact should come as no surprise to long time readers of our map-blogs. Here's an old post about the 2016 Rio Olympics that shows similar trends. Here's another old post where we take a historical look at where the best freestyle wrestlers are from. 

And here is a slightly more recent post where we take a comprehensive look at where the best wrestlers in the world are from, appropriately titled: "Where Do The Best Wrestlers In The World Come From?"

All those blogs are full of great maps. If you love maps about wrestlers, you'll love those blogs. 

And if you love tables filled with the information I used to create the maps in this blog, I've got more good news for you: that exact table can be found below!