Balfour ready for wrestle-off
Jevon Balfour’s Olympic dream is still very much alive.
Last August, the five-time defending Canadian senior wrestling champion was grappling with an awful predicament. He had a detached retina in his left eye and was told there were two possible outcomes. If doctors were able to reattach his retina, it would be too risky for him to continue wrestling. If the retina wasn’t able to be repaired, he could still wrestle but he would be facing a lifetime of severely restricted vision in the eye.
The 25-year-old Brampton native underwent successful eye surgery in the fall and doctors had a different opinion of the possible outcome.
“The doctor said, ‘I wouldn’t if I were you, but it’s your passion so if you want to, you go ahead and do it. Your eye is healthy.’
“There is obviously a risk it could get injured again even it it was perfectly fine so it’s all up to me,” Balfour said.
The two-time Commonwealth Games medalist agreed it wasn’t an easy choice to make.
“At first I was fine with it (being over). But then I got the goggles, started moving around and feeling good and my back was no longer hurting. That was an injury I had last year.”
It took him about two days to get used to wrestling while wearing goggles.
“It’s not that bad at all.”
The eye wasn’t healed enough to compete at the Olympic trials in December in Niagara Falls so Balfour applied to Wrestling Canada for a wrestle-off against the winner of the trials, Jasmit Phulka of the Burnaby Mountain Wrestling Club. The application was accepted and the wrestle-off will be held Feb. 8 at the University of Calgary. Phulka will start the wrestle-off with a 1-0 lead in a best-of-three matches final and Balfour will need to win both matches to qualify for the first Olympic qualifier March 13 to 15 in Ottawa.
“I’m excited,” Balfour said. “Obviously you have nerves because you want to win, but I feel excitement is a form of nervousness.”
Balfour had wrestled Phulka seven or eight times and has never lost to him. The two wrestled in the 2019 Canadian senior finals and while Phulka had the only takedown of the match, Balfour won 3-2 by scoring on a push-out with 19 seconds left in the match.
“I am not taking him lightly,” he said. “He is a good wrestler and he has his little moves that he does, but I am pretty confident in my abilities and the way I have been wrestling.”
Brock Wrestling Club head coach Marty Calder feels Balfour is ready.
“He looks good. It has been an adjustment for him to get used to the goggles and things like that but now it is just confidence,” he said. “He went though a pretty brutal ordeal and I think he is where he needs to be now mentally and physically too.
“He is the guy who has done it for quite a few years now and we believe in him.”
Calder knows it won’t be easy to defeat Phulka.
“We respect him,” he said. “He is a good competitor and Jevon is going to have to be firing on all cylinders to win.”
Taking part in a wrestle-off is nothing new for the Brock coaches.
“We have had a lot of them and we like these one-on-one matches where we can focus on one opponent rather than going to a tourney and having 40 opponents or whatever we get,” Calder said.
Balfour can’t wait to get down to business.
“Tokyo 2020 is the dream and this is the first step.”
