Olympic Dreams: Record-Setting Quintet Looking to Make More History in Paris

Adam Coon lights up at the memory of a brief interaction he had with Myles Amine back in December 2021. Amine had just won Olympic bronze in Tokyo a few months earlier, and San Marino, the tiny mountain republic in Italy that he competes for, commissioned a set of commemorative Euro coins to pay tribute to its three Olympic medalists that year -- the first in the country's history.

Coon asked if he could have one as a keepsake and offered to, at minimum, pay him the value of the coin. Amine turned down the money, suggesting instead that he would take his repayment in the form of a coffee together in Paris.

Fast forward three years, and Amine and Coon are part of a contingent of five University of Michigan wrestling alumni -- along with Austin Gomez, Stevan Micic and Mason Parris -- now in Paris for the 2024 Olympics. It is nearly a full team's worth of wrestlers, and it is the first time that a college wrestling program has sent that many different representatives to a single Olympic Games.

It is all a realization of head coach Sean Bormet's vision when he returned to his alma mater as an assistant back in 2011 and overhauled the Wolverines' Cliff Keen Wrestling Club.

Established in 1987, the CKWC provides resources to assist current Michigan and postgrad senior-level athletes as they pursue goals of international success on the world and Olympic stage. It is part of USA Wrestling's Regional Training Center (RTC) program, aimed to tap into college campuses to help develop Olympic hopefuls in the international styles. Four of the Wolverines' five Olympians are full-time members of the CKWC, which operates parallel to -- and hand-and-hand with -- the Michigan program.

"I would say that the Cliff Keen Wrestling Club and our Michigan wrestling program are totally connected from a standpoint that they help elevate each other," said Bormet. "That's why our commitment is so high to the club and reflects the commitment to the college wrestling program. We want to attract the best recruits that not only want to win Big Ten and NCAA championships but want to go on and have international success on the world stage. As our club has grown and become more successful, so has our college program. It's a dual commitment that we feel is crucial to how we want to run the program here."

Since 2018, the practice room at Michigan's Bahna Wrestling Center has produced seven Olympic berths, an Olympic medal, two world titles (one senior, one junior) and six total world medals. At the same time, the Wolverines have earned five top-five NCAA finishes, including a pair of trophy finishes, captured a Big Ten title -- the program's first since 1973 -- and produced a Hodge Trophy winner, two NCAA champions and 25 total All-America honors.

"In every facet of the operation, you're measuring, evaluating and making decisions focused on growth," said Bormet. "It starts with your resources, because without the resources you can't have the level of athletes, the number of athletes we have and the coaching resources. So, we're constantly trying to grow the right athletes with the right goals to put around our college guys. The growth has also come as we've had more proven results. It's attracting more of the top guys that want to move and train full time in Ann Arbor, and it's also attracted some of the top guys around the world that want to come in and spend a month in our environment and train here. But growth is always the focus, and that will not change after 2024."

"I think I'd be remiss if didn't go back to the start of it when I first started coming here as an RTC athlete in 2014 as a junior or senior in high school," said Amine. "Growth isn't linear, right? It's exponential. There was a lot of groundwork that had to be laid from that 2014 to 2020 era.

"It's cool to realize this vision of what we were looking to build, but there's definitely some unfinished business. Once you get to a certain level of producing All-Americans, NCAA champs, Olympians, there's no going back. Now it's just the standard. It's a lot of responsibility. But at the same time, you just keep recruiting the right guys and developing them into those kinds of wrestlers. So, as a lifelong Wolverine, it's been exciting for me to watch it unfold and be a part of that growth."

Sean Bormet

Amine thought he wanted to be done with wrestling in 2020. He wanted to take a run at making the Tokyo Olympics, but beyond that he was comfortable and content with all he had done in the sport. With a business degree from Michigan, he was starting to feel some pull toward opportunities knocking outside of wrestling.

Then COVID-19 delayed the Olympics, and the additional year of training, competing and learning changed his course for his future.

Specifically, it was his work with CKWC freestyle coach Sergei Beloglazov. Considered among the best freestyle wrestlers in the history of the sport, Beloglazov captured two Olympic and six world goal medals for the Soviet Union, holding an eight-year grip on the 57kg class from 1980-87. Prior to arriving in Ann Arbor, Beloglazov served as a national team coach for Japan, Russia, the United States and Kazakhstan. Beloglazov arrived in Ann Arbor in 2018, around the same time Amine started to think about a career in international wrestling, freestyle and competing on the world stage.

It was through his transition from high school to college that Amine first realized there was another level to wrestling, and with Bormet, he now had access to a knowledge that he did not have before. There was still so much more to learn. He and Micic came in on Saturday mornings and worked with Bormet on the finer details -- with a single-leg finish or a high-crotch crackdown position. Then with Beloglazov, Amine realized there was yet another level. He was nowhere near his peak.

"I remember wrestling at my first European Championships in 2018 and seeing that different style of wrestling first person and just thinking, again, this is a whole different level of wrestling," said Amine. "It seemed like the small details were even more exacerbated. Then I came back to Ann Arbor and realized that Sergei had all the answers to that level of wrestling. I mean, he's probably top five in the world for his understanding of wrestling, if not the best. So, it wasn't like I was discouraged. It actually kind of reignited my flame."

Among the things Bormet is most proud of is the collection of wrestling minds assembled in the Bahna Wrestling Center, something he views as crucial to building a successful wrestling environment. Beloglazov, CKWC Greco coach Momir Petkovic and Michigan assistant Kevin Jackson have four Olympic gold medals, eight world titles and 13 world medals among them. The CKWC roster includes four Olympians and combined for two world titles and nine medals.

"One of my favorite things about being in the room at the end of a practice is looking around and seeing our senior-level guys, world-class coaches and college guys sitting around the room, laughing, smiling, working on positions, talking about technique and breaking down positions with each other," Bormet said. "I think that's the healthiest environment you can have."

Amine has thrived in that environment. In Tokyo, he became Michigan's first-ever freestyle Olympic medalist with his bronze at 86kg. Two years later, in 2023, he added his first world medal with another bronze-medal finish. He captured a European title in 2022 and is a six-time European medalist, placing in every single appearance since missing the podium in his 2018 debut.

On the college mat, Amine was the first ever five-time All-American in NCAA wrestling history, reaching the 184-pound championship finals in his last appearance. He captured two Big Ten titles and, in 2022, shared the conference's Most Outstanding Wrestler award -- with Gomez, incidentally -- when his overtime win over Penn State's Aaron Brooks all but clinched the team title for Michigan.

If he was content with his wrestling accomplishments in 2020, he is assuredly more so now as he approaches his second Olympic Games in Paris. Maybe that is why he uses words like "relaxed" and "dedicated" while describing his mindset over this summer. He has been through this process before and believes that he is operating at a higher level now than he was three years ago. His faith in himself and what he can accomplish remains unwavering. He has already won an Olympic bronze medal, so there is no reason for him not to believe he is capable of and going after gold.

"I feel like this one is more for me than any of the other ones," he said. "I just feel very grateful to be competing still and doing this all over again. It's most people's lifelong dream to compete in one Olympics. But to go to two now, you almost have to pinch yourself to prove it's all real. For me, I can say it is."

Three years ago, Gomez was completely out of wrestling. He had missed a full season and part of another dealing with a series of concussions as an undergrad at Iowa State. After the fourth one and coupled with additional missed time due to multiple knee injuries, he had had enough. In December 2020, Gomez announced that he was medically retiring from wrestling. Frustrated and disappointed, he had fallen out of love with the sport.

But with some time away came the itch to compete again. After a concussion specialist cleared him to return, and Gomez resumed his career at Wisconsin, where finally healthy and bumped up two weight classes to 149 pounds, he reeled off a 23-4 record, captured a Big Ten title and took fourth at the 2022 NCAA Championships for his first All-America finish. Along the way, he beat several of the nation's highest-ranked wrestlers, a trend that continued into the next year when he surged to No. 2 in the nation after defeating Cornell's Yianni Diakomihalis -- then a three-time NCAA champion -- in a November dual.

Another knee injury derailed that season, and Gomez again had had enough -- this time of college wrestling. He decided to forgo his final year of eligibility and get started on a senior-level freestyle career, and he wanted to do it in Ann Arbor with the Cliff Keen Wrestling Club.

His father, Hector, and Bormet had known each other since they were high school wrestlers in Illinois, and Gomez grew up training at Bormet's former club, the Overtime School of Wrestling. His plan had been to wrestle for Bormet and Michigan in college, but Jackson, then Iowa State's head coach, changed his mind and successfully recruited him west to Ames. With Jackson now at Michigan alongside Bormet, Gomez knew exactly where he wanted to be and who he wanted coaching him.

"Everything kind of came full circle," said Gomez. "I've had relationships with both of those guys for a long time, and they're two guys I really respect and look up to. So, I just knew Michigan was the perfect spot for me. I've always told myself that if I want to become the best version of myself on and off the mat, I need to surround myself with people who have the same goals as me on and off the mat. And if I want to be a world and Olympic champ, the best way to do that was to surround myself with world and Olympic champs."

Freestyle was the plan. Making the Olympics was the goal. He had moved on from folkstyle and college wrestling. But with some time in the Michigan room and around the Wolverine team last fall, that itch came back again. He did not want to risk regret down the road, so he petitioned the NCAA for and received his medical hardship for one final year, and he and Bormet sat down to devise the path forward.

Everything built up to March. The two schedules could not have worked out better. The Pan American Olympic Qualifier would be in Acapulco, Mexico, the weekend between the end of the regular season and the Big Ten Championships. Perfect. Take care of business down there and come back ready to go for the Big Ten and NCAAs.

He nearly pulled off the trifecta. But first he gave everyone in Ann Arbor a scare.

Down 12-8 to former Penn State NCAA champion Nick Lee with 1:31 left in the quarterfinals of the Pan Am Qualifier, Gomez, who represents Mexico in international competition, screamed out in pain and went down with an apparent knee injury. After being tended to for nearly two minutes on the mat, Gomez pulled himself up and promptly scored 14 unanswered points in less than a minute to end the bout with a 22-12 tech. He wrapped up his qualification in the semifinals, scoring three takedowns en route to a methodical 6-3 decision over North Carolina's Lachlan McNeil.

A week later, he took second place at the Big Ten tournament then followed it with another runner-up finish at NCAAs, where he knocked off the No. 2 and No. 3 seeds on his path to the 149-pound finals. Gomez finished his season at Michigan with a 13-3 record and his second -- and best -- NCAA All-America performance. And with that, he left college wrestling with no regrets.

"I'm happy I came back; it was worth it," said Gomez, "and I owe the world to Michigan and the coaches for giving me the opportunity to compete for one last year. I knew it was going be hard. I didn't have a week off for about three months. But I do believe that wrestling the college season really helped me qualify for the Olympic Games. After I qualified, all the pressure was off. I did what I came to do here, and going into Big Tens and NCAAs, I was just able to wrestle free, just have some fun and let it fly."

Gomez wants to do the same thing in Paris, where he will be fulfilling a lifelong dream.

"This is something that my dad has had planned for me since I started wrestling, was to make it to the Olympic Games, not only to make it to the Olympic Games, but to bring home the gold medal," he said. "It means everything, and I can't wait to see them in the stands while I compete and hopefully get my hand raised. Representing the University of Michigan and Cliff Keen Wrestling Club at the Olympic Games, there's nothing better that I could ask for."

Adam Coon

Like Gomez, Coon was out of wrestling back in 2021. He was with the Tennessee Titans.

His Olympic dream had ended in May just one step away from the Tokyo Games. He won the U.S. Olympic Trials, sweeping the championship series against Arizona State's Cohlton Schultz, but could not get the weight class qualified for the Olympic Games. He decided to move on to the next goal on his list -- play in the NFL.

He spent the summer practicing with the Titans, but injuries started to get in the way. He looked for additional opportunities in football but started to feel a pull back to wrestling. Maybe he'd give that Olympic dream one more shot.

He returned to the Bahna Wrestling Center, his previous home where he had trained for eight years and earned three NCAA All-America honors, in January 2023. His first day back in the room, he grabbed longtime friend and two-time world champion J'den Cox for practice. He knew he was a little out of shape, but he was a world silver medalist, surely it could not be that bad. It was. After practice, now a little embarrassed, he realized it was going to take a few more weeks. A few weeks later, he still wasn't there yet. It turned out the rust ran deeper than he anticipated.

"I had a similar transition from the high school wrestling into college," said Coon. "It took me a long time to get to that level, and now I was going from not wrestling at all to trying to be back at that highest level again. What took me like five years to get to, I wanted to get there in just several months. So, it was a struggle, and there were days where I was kind of questioning what the heck I was doing. But I knew where I wanted to be at the end of all this. That's what kind of kept me coming in each day trying to get a little bit better."

His focus on the journey and his ultimate goal helped him stay focused through a series of losses to Schultz over his first year back. In Coon's absence, Schultz had taken over the top spot at 130kg Greco with back-to-back World Championships appearances. In the grand scheme of making the Olympic team, those losses -- four in a row entering the trials -- didn't mean anything. He decided to learn from them -- what went wrong, what could we change, how can we make it better -- and train that much harder to not make those same mistakes again. The hardest part was then to put it behind him and focus only on the next match.

At the trials, Coon dropped the first match of the best-of-three championship series -- now a fifth straight loss to Schultz. One more loss and he would be done, and the dream would be retired once again. He evened the series with a razor-thin win and felt like he had all the momentum entering the winner-take-all third match. With no reason to hold anything back, Coon gave everything he had in that final match; it was his best performance against Schultz in three years. With four points in opening two minutes of the match, it felt over early -- after splitting 1-0 matches earlier in the series -- and Coon iced it with a second-period takedown for a 6-1 win.

"I trained incredibly hard leading up the trials," said Coon. "Cohlton and I are both competitors, and we're both going to compete hard. I tried to work positions of advantage and was able to secure those positions better than he was in those first two matches. I was really just focused on one match at a time, one position at a time, one minute, one second. Going to the Olympics has been a dream since I was a little kid. I left the sport for a little bit but felt like I had unfinished business; I came back literally for that moment and feeling I had at the trials."

In Coon's corner, Bormet had never seen Petkovic so excited and emotional after the deciding match. He had recruited Petkovic, a 1976 Olympic gold medalist for Yugoslavia who spent 17 years as USA Wrestling's assistant national Greco coach, to the CKWC to work specifically with Coon. Living in Indiana in retirement, Petkovic drove up to Ann Arbor for two weeks every month for the last year and a half. And Coon, who had briefly worked with him prior to his run to silver right out of college at the 2018 World Championships, credits him as being instrumental in his recent gains.

"The way that he's been able to elevate my wrestling -- Greco-Roman specifically and just wrestling in general -- has been incredible," said Coon. "He's taught me more of the basics and fundamentals of Greco-Roman wrestling, which is something that I had been lacking. He brings a different mindset to it and has pushed me and trained me in ways different than I have been before to get that next level of wrestling."

In addition to bringing in Petkovic, the Cliff Keen Wrestling Club regularly brought in Greco-specific training partners for Coon -- both domestic and international -- and sent him and Petkovic to extended overseas camps where he could find multiple partners of his size and style. With a little extra effort -- and resources -- the CKWC and Coon found a way to make it work.

"The fact that I'm the only Greco guy never deterred me because there's something special going on here at Michigan," said Coon. "I can't imagine calling any other place home. Michigan is where I enjoy training, it's where I want to be, and it has the people that I want to surround myself with. And I think the results are showing as to why."

Mason Parris

Parris has had a truly remarkable run over the last 17 months -- an NCAA championship, Hodge Trophy, a world medal and now a spot at the Paris Olympics. But one could argue it started a year earlier with a sacrifice.

2021-22 was tough for Parris, who posted a 19-6 record that season and placed fifth at the NCAA Championships. A successful year by most standards, but Parris was not himself, wrestling through the limitations and frustrations caused by a herniated disc in his neck he suffered at the U.S. World Team Trials that previous fall. The injury caused him to lose feeling in his left hand and arm. But instead of surgery, he decided to rehab it. Michigan needed him.

The Wolverines had arguably the best lineup in program history that season with veterans occupying every weight class, but they had to have Parris to make a proper run of it. So, he returned to the lineup in early January, and with his help, Michigan captured its first Big Ten team title in nearly 50 years before claiming a runner-up finish at the NCAA Championships in Detroit. And Parris has never regretted putting the team before his own individual objectives.

He took the following summer off from competition and poured himself into training and the weight room to regain the strength lost in his arm and even out the sides of his body. He also spent extra time honing his folkstyle technique on the mat with all focus on his final collegiate season.

There was some consideration among the coaches of redshirting him in 2022-23, but Parris instead went the other direction. Not only did he wrestle, but he wrestled every single competition on Michigan's schedule from the MSU Open through the Cliff Keen Las Vegas Invitational and every single dual through the grind of the Big Ten slate.

And he did not lose, not once, posting a perfect 33-0 record en route to the NCAA heavyweight title and a week later, the 2023 Dan Hodge Trophy, presented annually to the nation's top collegiate wrestler. When asked about his future plans in the NCAA press conference after his final collegiate match, he only looked out as far as the 2024 Olympics. He dubbed it Parris in Paris.

But first he announced himself on the senior-level world stage. A late addition to the U.S. Freestyle World Team last summer, Parris came just 50 seconds short of reaching the 125kg final before closing out his tournament the next day with a dominant tech fall in the bronze-medal match. Previously a junior world champion in 2018, Parris has medaled at every international tournament since his college graduation, including two gold medals apiece at Pan Americans and the Polyak Imre & Varga Janos Memorial, part of the UWW Ranking Series.

The world medal earned him an automatic spot in the best-of-three finals at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials, where he swept Hayden Zillmer, 7-0, 7-0, to make Parris in Paris a reality.

"It's been a great year," said Parris. "I feel like I've just grown exponentially every year in my wrestling ability since I got to Michigan, and I'm a different wrestler today than I was even a year ago. Being able to focus on it full time without having to worry about school has been huge. I really think I've improved in every area, and my confidence has been really growing. I know that I can beat any of these guys in the world; I'm right with them. So, I just want to continue to improve on that and get better every day. It's been an amazing journey so far."

With Parris and Coon's sweep of the U.S. heavyweight spots, Michigan is just the sixth college program since 1956 to put a representative on both the freestyle and Greco teams in the same year. The only other time a school manned both heavyweight spots was 1972 when Iowa State's Chris Taylor wrestled both styles.

It topped off a good month for Wolverine heavyweights, with Parris and Coon's performance at the Olympic Trials coming on the heels of Lucas Davison's charge to the NCAA finals from the No. 10 seed in late March. Some have since wondered if Michigan is on its way to becoming the new Heavyweight U.

Parris and Coon both credit Michigan's commitment to finding them high-level partners. In addition to each other and, over the last year, Davison, the regular rotation includes Cox, Ben Honis and David Modzmanashvili, an Olympic silver medalist and world bronze medalist from Georgia who has trained with the Wolverine heavyweights since summer 2022.

"Being a heavyweight growing up, it's always been hard for me to find good quality wrestling partners," said Parris. "Coming here to Michigan, the coaches have taken really good care of me to make sure I've had the best training partners in the country and possibly the world. And these guys, they're just a lot of selfless guys that pour a lot into me to make me the best that I can be. I'm very grateful for all of that."

And they're grateful for each other. Combined, Coon and Parris held down Michigan's heavyweight spot for 10 years, from 2014-23, but were never teammates in college. As part of the CKWC, Coon stuck around Bahna and helped Parris in his transition to becoming an elite college heavyweight. Now years later, after countless workouts in the room together, a global pandemic, a Hodge Trophy and a retirement and return, they are enjoying their second chance as teammates on the U.S. Olympic squad.

"I love Adam," said Parris. "He was a big mentor to me coming into college. He's helped me so much by giving me looks of these other international guys with the good hand fight that he puts up and his underhooks. It's been amazing for me to learn from him over the years, annd hopefully he's been able to learn some areas from me too. He's an awesome guy, so it's been a lot of fun to experience this together."

"I don't think it's a coincidence at all that you've got the two highest guys coming out of the same room," said Coon. "I love Michigan, and I love the way they train us, especially the big guys. Mason is something special. It's nice to be able to work some par terre stuff with him and hand fight -- I'm not exactly grabbing legs on him, and he's not going to pummel me -- but it's been great to train with him and it's been great to train next to him. We have that friendly competition between us two; we're always trying to outdo each other. He definitely got the better hand in college, but hopefully we can both get it done in Paris."

Stevan Micic

Micic always knew he was among the very best in the world.

He was tired of coming up short. Some of it was due to bad luck -- an injury a month before the 2018 World Championships, a bout of mononucleosis before the Tokyo Olympics, where he was the top seed -- while some of it was a result of rough cut down to 57kg or simply razor-thin losses to other world-elite opponents.

He broke through with a bronze medal at the 2022 World Championships, which felt like a monkey off his back. He regained some confidence after a tough stretch between the disappointing Olympics and a challenging season up at 141 pounds in his final year at Michigan. But with his first senior-level world medal, he had gotten his swagger back.

The even bigger breakthrough came a year later when he captured the 57kg gold medal in front of a spirited Serbian home crowd at the 2023 World Championships in Belgrade. With it, he became Serbia's first senior-level gold medalist in freestyle wrestling and the first freestyle world champion in Michigan program history.

Micic certainly had to earn it, going 5-0 with dramatic comeback wins over world champions in each of his last three bouts. In the quarterfinals, he scored three takedowns in the second period, including a single leg at the buzzer, to earn a 9-7 win over Olympic and two-time world champion Zaur Uguev of Russia. Then he hit a late four-point chest-lock throw to beat Albania's Zelimkhan Abakarov, the reigning 57kg world champion, 6-2 in the semis. And in the championship match, he scored five unanswered points, including two takedowns in the second period, en route to a 7-4 win against Japan's Rei Higuchi, the 2022 61kg world champion and an Olympic silver medalist at 57kg.

"It was insane," said Micic. "I couldn't believe it. I had to tell myself to soak it all in. It wasn't just some match; I was the best in the world at that moment. It's what I'd been dreaming for my whole life. I visualized that moment, beating those guys, getting my hand raised, being on the top of the podium with the Serbian national anthem playing, so it actually didn't feel like the first time it happened. I knew I could do to, so it wasn't a surprise to me. But I actually did it, and it was amazing."

Micic's gold medal capped an incredible world championships for the Wolverines. In a span of about three hours the day before, Micic reached the 57kg final and Amine and Parris captured bronze at 86kg and 125kg, respectively. Despite wrestling for three different countries, they were able to feed off each other's wins and momentum.

In interviews after his last match, Amine talked about watching Micic's quarterfinal and semifinal wins from a cell phone in his hotel room while attempting to get a nap before his medal round. "Stevan pumped me up," he said at the time. "We were all talking, the Michigan guys, and we're like man, that's a way to kickstart a day. Between me winning [in repechage] and then Stevan beating two world champions, now I've got to go out on top."

The three all had been teammates at Michigan. Micic, a three-time All-American and Big Ten champion, and Amine spent seven years together in Ann Arbor, and along with Logan Massa, brought a new face to the program when they all earned All-America honors as freshmen and helped pave the way for an elevated wave of success under Bormet, who became head coach in 2018. They overlapped with Parris for their final four seasons and, in their last year, captured that 2022 Big Ten title together in the 100th season of Michigan wrestling.

After the 2022 world championships, Micic returned home to northwest Indiana and a year later, opened the Chicago Galaxy International Wrestling Club with his father, Steve, who had recently retired and taken over full-time coaching duties for Stevan. Their goal is to one day make it an independent RTC, unconnected to any university, that focuses on senior-level freestyle for wrestlers from all over the world. Based out his own club, Micic has been able to tailor his training plan to the specific techniques, schedule, partners and overseas travel and competition that he feels best suit him.

"I'm really happy with how my training is going now," he said, "having my dad involved and the training partners that I have and being able to really focus on myself to get what I need to be done.

"But Michigan and Cliff Keen, those are the people I consider my brothers. I miss my friends and I miss my extended family at Michigan, all the coaches and all the athletes. The culture we have in Ann Arbor, I never felt like we put too much pressure on each other outside the practice room and competition. We were able to have fun, joke around and mess around. I love wrestling, but I love my free time too. I feel like all of us are kind of wired the same way, so the dynamic and chemistry of that kept things fresh and going really well all through college. That plays a part in how you're going to train when you get to the highest level of wrestling; you're going to have the same mindset and approach that you developed at Michigan."

As coach Bormet has been known to say, the bonds built through the sport of wrestling are unparalleled, and the more people you have doing something special together, the better it is. Over the last several years, Michigan had built that type of environment inside the Bahna Wrestling Center, where its wrestlers -- both Wolverine and CKWC -- lift each other up, motivate, encourage and push each other. They're competitive with each other -- no matter doing short goes in the room or playing handball -- and what makes Bormet the proudest, they care about each other and each other's results.

What Micic, Amine and Parris learned in Belgrade last fall is that while winning is a lot of fun, winning together alongside your teammates and friends is better. Winning together makes it all the more special.

"I think it makes it feel more like a game rather than a life-or-death situation," said Amine. "Sometimes, especially in a in a sport like wrestling, we take everything so seriously. But when you're training with guys every day, you realize how goofy we all are off the mat, and you realize that you can be a high-level athlete and be a unique individual with a unique personality and interests. Those things aren't mutually exclusive. These guys all have really put my mind in a better spot leading up to the Olympics. There are a lot of hard things that you go through in wrestling, but when you get to go through them with great people, it definitely makes it more fun."

"There are little ways we push each other," said Coon, "and there are little ways that we have fun with each other. Really, we're all just surrounded by great individuals that are constantly pushing to the highest level of success. Even on my down days, I can feed off the energy they bring in the room, and I'm sure I provide the same for them. I've really enjoyed going through this experience with this group of guys, and I look forward to having some fun in Paris with them."

And once they get there, Coon and Amine will need to carve out some time together around their training and competition schedules to find a good café. Adam still owes Myles a Parisian coffee.