U.S. wrestler Spencer Lee vents his frustration after taking silver

PARIS — Spencer Lee bowed his head to accept his silver medal, but the last place he wanted to be Friday was on the medal stand with something other than gold around his neck.

"First thing I thought of was to take it off, but that's OK, right?" Lee said. "You can get a laugh out of that, right? I don't even have it anymore. I gave it to my sister. I don't even know where it is."

Lee's first Olympics came to a disappointing end Friday when he lost a tightly-contested gold-medal match at 57 kilograms to Japan’s Rei Higuchi, 4-2. The match was tied at 2 until the waning seconds, when Higuchi earned two late points with Lee pressing for a takedown.

Had the score remained tied at 2, Higuchi would have won because his points came on a two-point takedown early in the second period, while Lee earned one point twice for driving Higuchi out of bounds.

Frustrated by his performance, Lee initially walked through the mixed zone without speaking to reporters. He stopped on his second time through, after the medal ceremony, and explained his disgust.

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"Just I'm a guy who believes more in wins and losses, it's more about effort, and I don't think I put a lot of effort in that match, so I didn't deserve to win today and that's OK," he said.

Asked what, if anything, he would have done different tactically, Lee said he should have been more aggressive from the start.

"Honestly, just do a lot more action," he said. "Create action, force him to wrestle me. Yeah, he scored one scramble, but I think the action favors me, and I let him hang on my hand and kind of just stand there. And he won one scramble and that was it."

A three-time NCAA champion at Iowa, Lee had a strong showing in his first Olympics despite how it ended.

He outscored his first three opponents 29-8, marching from unseeded to the gold-medal match, and battled Higuchi, a silver medalist at the 2016 Olympics who missed the Games in 2021 when he failed to make weight, to a near draw.

Lee, who was warned multiple times for slow play Friday, said after the match he still is "figuring out whether I want to keep wrestling" after fighting back from knee injuries to compete internationally.

"A lot of time and effort put into getting back into a healthy enough state to wrestle and then I go and I fail," he said. "So we'll figure it out from here."

Asked how long it will take to put his silver medal-winning performance in perspective, Lee said, "I don't think there'll ever be perspective where I think it's good.

"Twenty years from now, you try and name Olympic silver medalists. I bet you can't," he said. "It's because no one cares."

Aaron Brooks (86 kg) gave the U.S. men's freestyle team a second wrestling medal Friday when he beat Uzbekistan’s Javrail Shapiev, 5-0, for bronze.

Kyle Dake will wrestle for bronze Saturday at 74 kilograms, and Kyle Snyder (97 kg) and Zain Retherford (65 kg) begin their quests for Olympic medals.

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on X and Instagram at @davebirkett.