After travelling nearly 9,000 km away from home for a wrestling training camp, Flin Flon’s own wrestling prodigy, Hunter Lee, is back on Canadian soil.
Lee, along with 11 other Canadian wrestlers, recently attended an intensive wrestling program in Hiroshima, Japan. The trip came hot on the heels of Lee’s trip to Peru for the United World Wrestling Pan-American Championship.
In Peru, Lee won a bronze medal as part of Canada’s national under-17 team.
While in Japan, Lee and his fellow Canadians were billeted with local families. For Lee and his teammates, there was a culture shock.
“We had to Google Translate everything,” said Lee. “All the food and everything was different over there. The practices were all different than what we were used to.”
At the training camp, more attention was paid to sparring and actual wrestling than technique and situational scenarios. This is different from the training he’s used to at home.
“We’d go to practice, we’d do 10 minutes of technique, and then we’d do another hour and a half of basically hard matches,” Lee said. “At our practices, it’d be a lot more technique and a lot more situational wrestling, like drilling different positions.”
The camp also featured two duels for each wrestler against their Japanese counterparts. Lee won both his duels.
Lee now heads to Saskatoon for training, before leaving next month for the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
“I’m going to be down there for a week, training with the Canadian junior team, the Canadian cadet team, the American cadet team – a bunch of guys,” says Lee.
After returning from Colorado, Lee will take on his biggest test yet: the United World Wrestling Championship, to be held in Tbilisi, Georgia in September.
While in Japan, Lee defeated the country’s national under-20 wrestling champion. He has already defeated the Canadian under-20 champion.
Lee’s younger brother, Carson, has been doing some jet-setting of his own, and is currently attending a camp in San Francisco.
To pay for the Lees’ travel and training expenses, Hunter, Carson and their families are continually raising funds, holding events and starting a crowdfunding page to help with their expenses.
Hunter says the fundraising drive has been successful for his family so far. “It’s been going good. I think we’re right near the amount of money we need for the whole summer.
