TAKEDOWN.(The Talk of the Town)(women's freestyle wrestling comes to New York City)

Last week, in case you missed it, was women's-wrestling week here in the city--or, as Mayor Bloomberg put it, in his official proclamation, "United States Olympic Team for Women's Freestyle Wrestling Week." Bloomberg delivered the good news in a luxury box at the Staten Island Yankees game on Monday night, where he was joined by the squad, the country's first ever. (Women's wrestling will debut as an Olympic event in Athens this August.) According to those present, the Mayor also announced that he had declined a suggestion from a friend that he wrestle with the girls, naked, in the mud.

The next day, the women wore T-shirts and gym shorts, mostly, when they assembled for the opening of the squad's training camp, at the Di Silvestri Wrestling Center, at Staten Island's all-male Monsignor Farrell High School. The Wrestling Center, which is next to the school cafeteria, smells and feels like an indoor swimming pool, not a mud pit. It features wall-to-wall mats (washed each morning with chlorine), and there was no air-conditioning to absorb the humidity--of which there was plenty, even before the trainees, practicing their headlocks, chicken wings, and leg attacks, began to sweat.

All told, there were twelve grapplers--four prospective Olympians, one in each weight class, and eight alternates--and they ranged in build from soccer captain to gymnast to don't-mess-with-me. One female observer noted that the athletes were all "walking" between ten and fifteen pounds over their competition weights, and marvelled at their evident "cutting" abilities. (The women, unlike high-school boys, tend to eschew spit cups and trigger fingers as weight-loss methods, and stick to saunas and salads.) She pointed at Tela O'Donnell, who was entangled in an opponent's gut wrench--essentially a prone Heimlich maneuver. O'Donnell competes at a hundred and twenty-one pounds.

"Look at her, she's my size," the onlooker said. "And I weigh one-thirty-two."

Judging from the display that the women put on, Bloomberg would have fared poorly, clothed or not, in a head-to-head match with any of them. ...