Hamza Yerlikaya

Hamza Yerlikaya is a Turkish Greco-Roman wrestler, born in Kadıköy, Istanbul on 6 June 1976 to a family from Sivas. He won the Olympic gold medal twice (1996 and 2000), the world championship three times and the European championship eight times, and FILA named him its Wrestler of the Century. After retiring in 2007 he became a member of the Turkish parliament, then president of the Turkish Wrestling Federation and a deputy minister of youth and sports. ^{1 2}

Yerlikaya was born in Istanbul to a family that had moved there from Sivas; his father Mustafa was a former wrestler. He took up wrestling at eleven, and in 1993 he won the world championship in Stockholm at the age of seventeen — the youngest world wrestling champion ever. ¹

At the Atlanta 1996 Olympics Yerlikaya won the 82 kg gold medal at the age of twenty while performing his military service, the only Turkish athlete to win Olympic gold during service. He carried Turkey's flag at Sydney 2000 and won a second gold there. ¹ He took the world titles of 1993, 1995 and 2005 and eight European titles between 1996 and 2006, and FILA named him Wrestler of the Century. He retired in 2007 after neck fractures that did not heal fully. ³

Yerlikaya was elected to the Turkish parliament for Sivas and served from 2007 to 2011; he then presided over the Turkish Wrestling Federation from 2012 to 2015 and has been a Deputy Minister of Youth and Sports since July 2018, while the English article also reports him as an adviser to the Presidency. A sports complex in Istanbul's Gaziosmanpaşa district bears his name. ^{3 1}

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