Dan Dennis ready to wrestle in Rio Olympics

U.S. freestyle wrestler Daniel Dennis will begin his Olympics competition Friday morning in Rio de Janeiro. Dennis, who worked as an assistant coach with the Windsor High School wrestling team, faces Bulgarian Vladimir Dubov in a round of 16 match scheduled to start at 6:24 a.m. Pacific time. The full 57-kilogram division will be competed Friday with the championship match scheduled for 1:30 p.m.

PD reporter Phil Barber profiled Dennis before he left for the Rio Games. Here is that story, originally published July 30.

‘I could give you names,” Daniel Dennis was saying, “like Rahimi and Khinchegashvili and Aliyev, names like those that won't really mean anything to your readers.”

It's true. The pronunciations get harder as the competition gets stiffer in international wrestling, and Dennis has ascended to the realm of tongue twisters. He is the American representative at 57 kilograms (about 125.6 pounds) and will be taking on the world's best lightweight wrestlers at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics on Aug. 19.

“My friends and family are overwhelmingly proud and happy,” Dennis said by phone from Iowa City, Iowa, where he has been training with Team USA. “Words can't really describe what my mom is going through, my brother, my sister. I had a bunch of friends come out to watch (at the U.S. Olympic Trials in April), even friends from California, actually. The texts are more and more the closer it gets.”

From Illinois, where he was born, to Sonoma County, where he made a resolution to pursue his Olympic dream, they're rooting for Dan Dennis. The improbable story of his journey to Rio makes it easier.

A year ago, Dennis was living in a fifth-wheel trailer parked at a friend's construction yard outside Windsor. An elite college wrestler at Iowa, he had walked away from the sport after failing to qualify for the 2012 Olympics. Dennis wasn't just mentally fried at that point. He was a mess physically, with nerve damage in his left arm.

So Dennis hit the road. He came west to hook up with rock-climbing friends, drifted around the landscape, worked some wrestling camps and, for several months, slept in a Ford F150 pickup that he'd bought for $500 on Craigslist. Fortunately, Dennis is 5-foot-4; he could sleep in the cab and not hit his head on the door.

Eventually, Dennis' travels brought him to Sonoma County, where Windsor High School wrestling coach Rich Carnation encouraged him to sign on as an assistant. There was a connection. One of Dennis' teammates at Iowa was Joe DuCharme. His kid brother, Dominic, was wrestling at Windsor High; their father, Nate DuCharme, helps out Carnation's program. Dennis had participated in a Jaguars wrestling camp since his senior year at Iowa.

He had nothing better to do, so he tried his hand at coaching. Dennis might have settled in for a career on the sidelines, except that a handful of friends and family members started bugging him to attempt a comeback. For a long time, he brushed them aside. Finally he could deal with their nagging no longer. Dennis proposed a deal: He would wrestle one event, the U.S. Open Championships at Las Vegas in May 2015, if everyone promised to leave him alone afterward.

One tournament turned into two, then three, then a spot at the U.S. Olympic Wrestling Trials at Iowa City in April. Dennis won the 57k division and secured a place in Rio. He is proud of his accomplishment, yes, and excited. Just don't expect him to do backflips over wearing the Team USA uniform.

“I wish I had the rainbow answer for you, but I don't really focus on that too much,” Dennis said. “To represent the country is great, but it was the same going into the trials. I have a lot of friends, family and coaches who believe in me, and that's what's most important to me. I know that's not really the patriotic answer everyone wants, but that's how I feel.”

Since the trials, Dennis has wrestled at the Freestyle World Cup at Los Angeles in June, at a couple of training camps in Colorado and, as a final tune-up for Rio, at the Grand Prix of Germany a month ago. Dennis won the gold medal in Dortmund. The guy is on a roll.

Team USA leaves for Houston on Tuesday to pick up credentials and gear, and then on to Brazil on Wednesday. The Olympic opening ceremony is Friday.

As usual, Dennis will be an outlier. The United States isn't generally considered a powerhouse in the sport. One reason is that we wrestle “folkstyle” at the high school and collegiate levels; the Olympics feature “freestyle” matches.

As Carnation explains, the two styles are more or less identical from a standing position. On the mat, there are distinctions. In folkstyle, you must control your opponent to earn points. In freestyle, you have only to expose him or her. To earn a pin in folkstyle, you have to hold your foe's shoulder blades to the mat for a two-second count to score a pin. In freestyle, it's a pin if the shoulder blades simply touch at the same time.

“The Europeans, they're wrestling at a young age with only freestyle,” Dennis said. “We have a little different approach with folkstyle, then switching over.”

The top competitors at 57 kilograms, as Dennis suggested, include Hassan Rahimi of Iran, 2015 world champion Vladimer Khinchegashvili of Georgia and Haji Aliyev of Azerbaijan, who has dropped down from 61 kilos. Dennis is currently ranked No. 15 in the world in his weight class.

And yet Carnation fully believes his former assistant can win. He points out that Dennis is undervalued because he took so much time away from the sport. He also notes a couple of advantages.

One is that even at 29 years old, Dennis has strong recuperative powers. That's especially important in the Olympics, because the entire slate of wrestling at 57 kilos will be held in one day; bouncing back quickly is vital. The other thing in Dennis' favor, Carnation said, is that he thrives in Spartan conditions.

“There are a lot of creature comforts we are all accustomed to now - having a clean bed, a soft mattress, good food. Where if we don't have it, it can affect our performance because it will affect our mental outlook,” Carnation said. “Whereas Dan has been out in the Utah desert with just him and the lizards, and he's completely comfortable in that environment. So there's nothing in Rio, whether it's bad water, mosquitoes - whatever is there, it's still vastly better than what Dan has been used to and comfortable with for long periods of time.”

Because of his underdog status, you could say that Dennis is under less pressure than some guys. He doesn't approach it that way. Dennis said the pressure is still there; he just handles it better.

“That break helped me develop and be a little more mature about it,” he said. “That's the mindset now. There was pressure going into the trials. It will be the same going into this. I'm not going down there to throw my hat into the ring and do nothing. I want to win. It was the same at the trials. I just handle that pressure a little better now.”

Carnation won't be in Rio to watch his former assistant, as Nate DuCharme will be. But Aug. 19 will be a big day for the coach. He will invite his Windsor wrestlers over and project the competition onto a big screen. When Dennis wrestled at the Olympic trials in April, Carnation's heart was in his throat. This time? Not so much.

“I'm gonna feel calm. Very calm,” Carnation said. “The reason why is because Dan's done everything right. However it turns out is how it turns out. Put it this way: In all my years of coaching, I've been disappointed with some wrestlers' effort sometimes. With Dan, I have zero concern about his effort. He gives 150 percent in everything he does. He doesn't know how to do anything halfway.”

And there's no such thing as halfway up the medal stand. Dennis will either be standing on it, or he won't. Either way, Windsor can be plenty proud of its adopted son.