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still identifying possible candidates to appoint to its executive as it takes measures to promote the growth of wrestling in the country.

Only Olympic wrestling which appears to come to life every All-Africa Games or Olympic year has been active. The form of wrestling is not as popular as professional wrestling which is modelled almost along the lines of WWE and WWF.

Wrestling attracts billions of viewers the world over. Wrestlers are heroes of television viewers but Olympic wrestling is not that popular.

Patrick Mukondiwa, the secretary of the boxing and wrestling board, confirmed from Harare that  wrestling which had been dormant for a while would probably be resuscitated when they incorporate people with a passion for the sport.

“At the moment we are setting up structures. We are going to incorporate those from wrestling into the set up so that they can help resuscitate the sport.

“It has been quiet for a while and it’s about time we got promoters also coming on board to promote shows for athletes,” said Mukondiwa.

He said once they got names of people from the wrestling board they would then forward them to the Ministry of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture for approval.

There has been little activity in the sport since the late Jeff Dube scaled down operations in his promotions business in 1998.

He had managed to raise the profile of the sport through regular tournaments such as the “Thriller at the Border” held in Plumtree in 1998 and the “Rumble in the Jungle” in Maphisa.

On a regular basis he brought wrestlers from South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

At some stage wrestlers from the United Kingdom Jim Hogan, Tarantula, Big Daddy and Giant Haystack were regulars at tournaments in Zimbabwe.

The late Big Mike Tshuma, Vivian Honolulu Masuku, Maxwell Moondog Kutsanzira, Paul Bad News Ngozo and Robbie Kapora had helped hype up the sport in Zimbabwe at a time when Allan Ripper Mpofu were coming through the ranks.

Mukondiwa believes the sport has a future and challenged wrestlers to come out of the slumber and be counted.

At the beginning of the 1990s, wrestling was separated from fledging boxing but the people who were handpicked to run       the discipline tended to have a bias  towards Graeco-Roman wrestling which is amateur.

It was not until recently that the Ministry of Education assumed responsibility for boxing that had long been under the Ministry of Home Affairs through an old Act of Parliament crafted in 1956.