U.S. receives Greco-Roman draw at 2025 U17 World Championships

ATHENS, Greece – The Greco-Roman brackets have been released for the 2025 U17 World Championships being held at Ano Liossia Olympic Sports Hall, with an upstart team of 10 U.S. athletes entered in the field.

It will be the first World Championships appearance for all 10 members of the U.S. Greco-Roman unit, but that doesn’t mean international experience isn’t there. Half of the team got an international tune-up in at the U17 Pan American Championships, bagging five medals.

U17 Pan American champions Carter Shin and Arseni Kikiniou lead the way for Team USA in Athens. Shin opens his tournament at 51 kg against Pavlos Tsentidis of Greece, a 2024 U15 Balkans Championships bronze medalist. Kikiniou gets a stout opponent in his opener—2025 U17 European silver medalist Janes Nazaryan of Armenia—at 65 kg.

At 45 kg, U17 Pan American silver medalist Thales Silva has drawn the toughest “on paper” opponent of any U.S. athlete—2025 U17 European champion Abdurrahman Huseynli of Azerbaijan. Fellow U17 Pan American runner-up Alex Taylor will take on Egypt’s Essam Hussein at 110 kg.

Isai Fernandez, a U17 Pan American bronze medalist, draws Bulgarian Valentin Valentinov, who finished in seventh place at the 2025 U17 European Championships, at 80 kg.

Kikiniou and Taylor will also compete on the men’s freestyle side later this week.

Additional Team USA athletes in the mix are Michael Rundell at 48 kg, Alexander Pierce at 55 kg, Will Detar at 60 kg, Dominic Wilson at 71kg and David Calkins Jr.  at 92 kg. First round matchups for each American can be found below.

The Greco-Roman tournament will be held July 28-30, kicking off the full week of wrestling in Athens. The Greco-Roman action begins at 10:30 a.m. local time each day. For those following along live, Athens, Greece, is located seven hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Time.

The U.S. will compete in two groups over the course of the Greco-Roman event. Group one, which starts on Monday, is comprised of Rundell, Pierce, Kikiniou, Fernandez and Taylor. Group two starts a day later, featuring Silva, Shin, Detar, Wilson and Calkins Jr.

Updated brackets and match-by-match results are available on UWW Arena. A live broadcast of the event is available for the U.S. market at FloWrestling.com.

Stay tuned to TheMat.com and USA Wrestling’s social media platforms for complete coverage of the U17 World Championships.