Oil Wrestling and an Afternoon with the President: The Unbroadcast Pulse at Atatürk Nation Garden

The smell of oil reached the air before the loudspeakers did. At Atatürk Nation Garden, on ground that was once the runway of Istanbul's largest airport, a rectangular arena had been laid out on grass, ringed by temporary stands. I stood in the seventh row. Close enough to hear the breathing, far enough not to have to crane my neck for two hours.

What I remember most is not a hold. It is the moment two wrestlers left their marks and walked toward the VIP tribune. They walked slowly. A kıspet — the leather trouser — grows several kilos heavier once soaked in oil, and on their skin the oil produced a light that did not reflect; it absorbed. Behind them, the organisers lined up. Ahead of them, a man stood up.

Few spectators around me looked at the wrestlers then. They looked at the man standing up.

That moment says almost everything about the report I was reading. The headline carried the president's name first; the two finalists were not named in it. The event is called the Presidential Cup. A federation-issued release noted that the head of state followed the contest "with interest", that he wished both wrestlers luck, that he greeted spectators before leaving. Four of the ten information points concerned his visit. Three concerned the competition itself.

Those ten points are all I have. My trade begins by admitting what I am missing.

Context first, because this sport almost never appears in Vietnamese-language press. Yağlı güreş — oil wrestling — is Turkey's traditional grappling sport. Two wrestlers strip to the waist, wear a leather trouser called a kıspet, made from buffalo or cattle hide, and are oiled head to toe before the bout. The oil makes gripping brutally difficult: there is no reliable place on an opponent's body to hold. Bouts are usually decided by a throw that puts the opponent flat on his back, or by judges' decision if time expires.

The biggest structural difference from every modern grappling discipline is this: yağlı güreş has no weight classes. No 60kg, no 74kg, no 96kg. A 70kg man can meet a 120kg man, and both carry the same title if they win enough.

The top tier is başpehlivan — roughly, "chief wrestler". It is not an administrative rank. It is a recognised caste earned through wins at major tournaments, and it stays with a man for life. The oldest and most prestigious tournament is Kırkpınar, held in Edirne, traditionally dated to the fourteenth century. Kırkpınar does not appear in the report I analysed, and I raise it only to fix the level: when the report calls both finalists başpehlivan, it is saying the final was a meeting of two men at the very top of the sport.

The Presidential Cup was staged at Atatürk Nation Garden. The venue deserves a pause. Istanbul Atatürk Airport ceased commercial passenger flights in April 2026, when the new Istanbul Airport opened. Part of the old airport site was later converted into a large public park, opened in mid-2026 under the government's "Nation's Garden" programme. When a sports federation stages an event on state-created public land, and when the head of state attends, questions about venue cost, funding structure and budget source are natural. The report answers none of them: no cost figure, no named sponsor, no ticket data, no attendance figure.

I checked repeatedly, following a habit I forced on myself in 2026. In that report, eight of ten information points carry no source. A single evaluative claim — that the event was followed "with interest" — sits on no data at all. There is no publication date. In my trade, a document like that is not a news article. It is a press release.

So what actually happened here, if we read the report as a governance document rather than a sports one?

The chain in the report has a clear order. At the top is the Presidential Office, as formal patron. Immediately below is the Ministry of Youth and Sports, represented by Minister Osman Aşkın Bak. At local level, Istanbul Governor Davut Gül. Then the Turkish Traditional Wrestling Federation — the organiser — and the World Ethnosport Confederation, whose president is Bilal Erdoğan, widely reported in international media to be the president's son. That last detail is public knowledge, not stated in the report, and I flag it as such so the reader knows what comes from the source and what I add.

That chain is not a guest list. It is an organisational model. The notable point is not that a president watched wrestling. It is that four separate institutions — a head of state's office, a ministry, a provincial governorship and two non-governmental heritage-sport bodies — appeared in a single ceremonial space, behind a tournament for which no financial or attendance data is public.

This is the structure governance scholars call patronage. It runs on its own logic, and that logic does not operate on ticket revenue. It operates on public budget, on scheduling priority and on presence. A patronised event does not need to prove how many people watched, because its measure of success is not the audience. Its measure is who sits in the honorary row.

The report gives exactly three sporting facts. Semi-finals: Orhan Okulu beat Seçkin Duman; Mustafa Taş beat Erkan Taş. Final: Mustafa Taş against Orhan Okulu. No bout duration, no decisive hold, no scoring sequence, no outcome of the final itself. That is the information level of a reprinted scoreboard, not a match report.

Based on my experience watching matches, I have to say this plainly: at that level of data, nobody — including someone in the seventh row like me — can judge form, conditioning or stylistic matchup between the two men. No birth dates. No height or weight. No prior head-to-head record. The materials I normally use to build a portrait of an athlete simply do not exist in the source.

One thing I can say, as an observation about the sport's structure: the absence of weight classes places yağlı güreş outside an ordering that most modern sport treats as foundational. In boxing, freestyle wrestling, judo, weight classes exist to protect fairness and to produce a measurable, rankable, licensable system. Without them, oil wrestling loses modern sport's strongest standardising tool. In exchange, it keeps something else: total unpredictability. A smaller wrestler can still win, if the technique is there.

That makes the sport harder, not easier. It also makes it harder to commercialise — because what television needs is a system that compresses into a table. With no weight classes, no rankings and no open data, the sport survives on community memory and patronage. Both are durable. Neither can be verified from outside.

A word about a name. The list contains two men surnamed Taş: Mustafa Taş and Erkan Taş. In Turkey, Taş is a common surname meaning "stone". Two men sharing a surname in the same bracket proves nothing. I weighed this line for a long time, because I know my own trap: seeing a beautiful pattern and wanting it to be true. A brother, an uncle, two relatives reaching the semi-finals of a heritage tournament — that story would be shared widely. It is unverified, so it stays in my notebook, not on the page.

The 2026 microphone stumble did not silence me; it taught me to listen before writing. I once mispronounced one of the world's most famous players three times in a single half, and the lesson that stayed was not "be more careful" — it was heavier: when I say a person's name wrong, I am saying that person matters less than the story I want to tell.

With oil wrestling, that problem multiplies. Mustafa Taş, Orhan Okulu, Seçkin Duman, Erkan Taş — four names crossing three alphabets and two transliterations to reach a Vietnamese reader. Every step is a chance to err. I cross-checked each name against Turkish and English sources, and against federation lists, before typing them here. It took longer than writing three paragraphs. I do it anyway, because it is the only part of this trade I fully control.

There are two common ways to misread an event like this.

One misreading turns it into pure politics: a president watches a traditional sport, and all that needs saying is about image. That reading erases the sport itself — four men who spent years earning the title başpehlivan, and a competition format with no weight classes that demands a technical level outsiders rarely grasp.

Another misreading is the one I made in my early years: turning the event into a symbol, hunting for a hidden pulse everywhere, assigning meaning to an afternoon that may simply have been an afternoon. I wrote pieces like that. They read beautifully. They were also often wrong. A pitch in 2026 planted a question in me: where does football beat when nobody scores? But that question is only worth anything if I accept a boring answer — that some days football beats nowhere at all. Just as some afternoons of wrestling are only afternoons of wrestling.

The counter-intuitive angle sits here: the report's greatest informational value is not what it says, but what it omits about how the tournament operates — and that silence, repeated often enough, stops being a small gap and becomes a feature of the system.

A federation stages an event under a head of state's patronage, on state-created public land, with a minister and a governor present, with a heritage-sport body led by the head of state's relative, and issues a release with no financial data, no attendance figure and no independent source. Nothing here evidences wrongdoing. Nor is there any transparency mechanism within the reader's view. I write this as a structural observation, not an allegation, and I ask the reader to hold that line for me.

One more thing needs saying plainly, because it is my trade's biggest trap.

Turkey has a vibrant football scene, clubs with long histories, and governance disputes between its football federation and public authorities that have run for years. A football writer like me is easily tempted to connect an afternoon at Atatürk Nation Garden to all of that, and to build an article about "power in Turkish sport". I nearly did.

But there is no club, no player and no football competition anywhere in this source. Connecting them would be fiction, not analysis. The only honest statement available is that this patronage model exists in the same policy environment as Turkish football, because both sit under the same ministry. That is a long-term monitoring theme, not a conclusion. I logged it next to other notes on national heritage-sport federations elsewhere, and left it there.

There is a dimension I do not want to skip, because it speaks directly to how states handle traditional sport.

Over the past two decades, many countries have moved indigenous sports into school curricula, national festivals and international events as a form of cultural diplomacy. China placed traditional martial arts in schools and in national ethnic games. South Korea promoted taekwondo as a national symbol and turned it into an Olympic sport. Japan did the same with judo and kendo. The "ethnosport" model pursued by the World Ethnosport Confederation belongs to that current, with one difference: it does not aim at the Olympics. It aims at a separate event system where many nations' traditional disciplines meet without conforming to Western technical standards.

That is an interesting idea, and it is also an idea that can become an instrument. When a heritage-sport confederation is led by someone with a family relationship to a head of state, and when that confederation appears in the official delegation of an event under that head of state's patronage, the question of where the state, the NGO and the family end becomes a fair question to ask. I ask it here as a question, not a verdict.

What I can state for certain concerns information: an event like this, covered by at least two independent outlets, would tell readers what it cost, who paid, how many attended, and how the final ended. The report in my hands gives none of it. And that gap is not accidental — it is what happens when information flows through a single door.

In Vietnam we have traditional sports at the same crossroads: village festival wrestling, stick pushing, crossbow shooting, tug of war at ethnic sports meets. The question we usually ask of them — how to organise more professionally without losing the soul — is the same question oil wrestling is answering in its own way, through a system with no weight classes, no rankings, no open data.

That afternoon at Atatürk Nation Garden left me with a question I cannot easily answer. Is a state-patronised sport protected from the market, or imprisoned in silence? When nobody has to sell tickets to survive, nobody has to disclose anything to be believed.

And I think of two men whose faces I never saw, only the oiled backs of as they walked toward the tribune. They knew what I also knew, stepping out of row seven: in that afternoon's frame, they were the background.

I write for those who stay in the dressing room after the stadium lights go out. Tonight, the ones who stayed were four oiled wrestlers, on an old runway turned public garden, under the lights of an event whose title line did not carry their names.