It’s hard to say that a world bronze medal is a dip in performance, but when you rattle off three strait world championships in your first three years on the senior level scene like Snyder did the shine of the bronze doesn’t seem quite as bright. Although this article was born from a deep dive into what, exactly, was scoring at 97kg at the 2019 World Championships, in order to look at Snyder’s evolution or devolution we will have to take a look at the previous years as well. Below is Kyle Snyder’s point total in of the 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2019 world championships and the 2016 Olympic Games. Keep in mind that this is just a total of what I call the meaningful rounds of the tournament (Quarters, semis, repechage, and medal matches).

Total Scores Per Year

• 2015 - 22 Points
• 2016 - 18 Points
• 2017 - 25 Points
• 2018 - 21 Points
• 2019 - 20 Points

Heres how the scores break down round by round.

Kyle Snyder's Average Points Score Per Match

• 2015 - 7.33 Points
• 2016 - 6 Points
• 2017 - 8.33 Points
• 2018 - 7 Points
• 2019 - 6.67 Points

Average Points Scored Over 5 World/Olympic Championships

• 7.07 Points

What have we learned? 

There are a few things that you need to take into account when looking at these numbers. 1. This is a small sample size. And 2. Wrestling is not like sports like baseball where you can make solid predictions on simple outcomes like scoring, there are simply too many variables. 

I have a hard time saying that Snyder has taken a step backwards since winning his last world title in 2017. The biggest drop in scoring output was in Rio where he wound up winning gold. Kyles’s 2019 campaign was a little less than a half a point under his scoring average over the 5 tournaments, I don’t have a mountain of data to support this claim, but something tells me that when someone “falls off” the scoring discrepancy between winning and not winning tournaments is greater than .4 of a point.  

Adding To The Arsenal

To be fair, I had my biases coming into this article. I really didn’t think that Snyder, despite not winning a gold medal since Paris in 17 has taken a big step backwards. I did however, think that he just kind of went stale. In 2019 Kyle had a hard time getting to his ankle pick and his high crotch. Usually when you see an elite wrestler not able to get to his best attack it’s a product of good scouting by opponents and their coaches, but the best wrestlers in the world will add to their arsenal at all times. The best example of this is Jordan Burroughs, by the time that JB won gold in London everyone in the world knew that his double leg was a major problem, so they started wrestling Jordan down on one knee or in a three point stance. So what did Burroughs do? Developed one of the best short offense games in the world. NBD. 

Whether moving to State College and training with the NLWC has an actual technical effect on the way that Snyder wrestles or whether he just needed a change of scenery you’ve got to think that his move was a result of him feeling stale and doing something about it. Considering the level of coaches and the level of training partners in that Nittany Lions room I would not be surprised if the next time we see Kyle Snyder compete not only does he add some new tools to the toolbox, but see a rejuvenated version of the 3x world/Olympic champion.