Olympic Champ Amit Elor Poised for MMA, Says Daniel Cormier: ‘They’re going to be in trouble’
UFC Hall of Famer and former two-division world champion Daniel Cormier firmly believes Olympic gold medalist Amit Elor will make waves in the world of mixed martial arts once she’s done dominating the amateur wrestling scene.
As a two-time Olympian and the coach of a high school wrestling team, Cormier has always kept a close eye on the sport that’s stayed near and dear to his heart long after he traded in the headgear for a pair of four-ounce gloves. Doing so has allowed him to work with and train alongside past, present, and future Olympians, including Elor.
“A little backstory, Amit Elor used to always be around the Bay area with a woman named Carolyn Wester, she coached at a club called Wrestling Prep and she teaches wrestling,” Cormier said on The Fighter vs. The Writer. “She’s a lady that coaches and she’s a tremendous coach, very smart lady.
“She would bring Amit into [American Kickboxing Academy]. I didn’t know who she was but she would wrestle with the boys. I have all these pictures of Amit, and Carolyn would take pictures of Amit with the team. That’s one thing they do in MMA gyms. At the end of practice, everybody gets together for a photo. Amit’s in a lot of those pictures” (h/t MMA Fighting).
At 20 years old, Elor became the youngest American to win a gold medal in wrestling, a record previously held by Henry Cejudo. She kicked off her tournament with a dominant 10-2 victory over 2023 reigning world champion Buse Tosun Çavuşoğlu of Turkey, followed by back-to-back shutouts against Poland’s Wiktoria Chołuj and Meerim Zhumanazarova of Kyrgyzstan.
Elor outscored her opponents by a stunning margin of 30-2 throughout her run at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
“She killed it,” Cormier said of Elor. “That first match, talk about bad luck. The World Champion from the year before from that weight class gets the World Champion from the weight up in her very first match. [Elor] destroys her. She went onto kill the rest of the field after that.”
‘DC’ stresses that Amit Elor should only pursue MMA once achieving her goals in wrestling
With the Summer Olympics scheduled to go down in her home state of California in 2028, Elor’s focus will be on bringing home another gold medal. But when the time does come for Elor to hang up her singlet, ‘DC’ thinks the Walnut Creek native could do some serious damage in four-ounce gloves.
“She’s going to fight,” Cormier said. “She’s going to be a fighter. For as good as she is in wrestling, she does really well in judo, she does tremendous in jiu-jitsu. If she does start doing [MMA] competitively, they’re going to be in trouble.”
He continued,“I love when great wrestlers come into mixed martial arts, but I’m always for them doing it after they’re done chasing their Olympic dreams. You don’t get to do that again. If you have an opportunity to be the best in the world, you chase that as long as you can and then you go do something different. I don’t think it should be coming earlier than needed.
“You go and wrestle as long as you need to wrestle, and then you come to try and make the money as the UFC fighter.”
