Georgia's unique world great grappling genetics that built the unprecedented rapid rise of a rugby nation from obscurity

In the 21st century Georgia has an impressive Olympic record per capita and GDP. In the "weighted medals" (so 4 points for Gold, 2 for Silver, 1 for Bronze) rankings Georgia has been in the top 6 countries at every single Olympics since 2000.

Olympic and 3x World freestyle wrestling champion in the
125kg heavyweight category Geno Petriashvili has the look of
someone who could easily have been the next Gorgodze in rugby

Their 47 medals have come in sports that might not surprise anyone familiar with the male Georgian physique. Combat and strength sports judo, wrestling, weightlifting, and boxing have provided all but one of them. The one exception was won by Nino Salukvadze in shooting, their only ever female Olympic medal. If you could find a medal table just with medal on the men's side then Georgia would consistently rank even higher still.

Georgia (population 3.7m) Olympics medal history

It seems just as for people of West Africa descent for sprinting, East Africa for long distance running, the Caucasus Mountain area per capita is a genetic hotspot for producing some of the most talented and strongest grappling athletes in the world.

According to analysis by the FloWrestling site: "there is no higher concentration of freestyle wrestling talent than the Caucasus Mountain area". They even produced a heat map to illustrate this point. Georgia specifically since 2000 has 4th most medals at World and Olympic wrestling championships only ranking behind vastly bigger countries.

Heatmap of Olympic freestyle medal winning talent (note the big red patch in the Caucasus region)

Of course, there is a fair amount of grappling in rugby too, where these aptitudes are expressed in the form of prolific production of elite level props and hard tough tackling back rows (the quantity and quality they have of the latter often gets a bit overlooked next to their fame for props yet their depth for that style of player gets stronger every year) and this leads onto the main explanation of the unprecedentedly historic rise of Georgia in this sport too.

Remember rugby has an incredibly static hierarchy. The list of the teams at the World Cup has not much changed a great deal since the event started in 1987. Nor has the list of quarter final contenders. Progress is usually slow and for sides ranked below the 30 the idea of reaching a World Cup within a decade sounds quite far fetched.

Georgia is the only ever country in rugby history to have risen as fast from such depths obscurity of playing in a division with the likes of Latvia, Luxembourg, & Switzerland back in 1993 to qualifying for their debut World Cup in 2003 only 10 years later.

That generation of Georgians achieved that despite the country being in a badly impoverished state in the 1990s. As mentioned in a previous article in 2003: "coach Claude Saurel had to pay for their official team tracksuits, and bring his own camera to be able to do video analysis [...] flanker Gregoire Yachvili talked of a lack of basic equipment saying such as tackle bags, body armour and scrum machines". A common anecdote commentators used to say back then was that were "just eight rugby pitches in the entire country" and they "use old converted Soviet tractors" as scrummaging machines.

So they had a total lack of rugby facilities, a lack of money, a tiny player pool (a number of the team of that era were relative latecomers to the sport), no deep rugby culture passed down the generations, and no close historical or geographical links to any "Tier 1" rugby power to draw upon for heritage players to provide scholarships and top class training from school age.

In such circumstances the odds were stacked against them ever exiting total rugby obscurity. A lot was not in their favour except for of course their genetics predisposition for excelling in technical strength and combat type sports ....

Obviously nowadays to compete more seriously at World Cups they have needed to get more investment and facilities. The modern generation of players has come through a totally different system to their predecessors who played in the 1990s and early 2000s. Georgia is a prime example of how nature and nurture build on each other. The natural predisposition and talent was there first, then once discovered encourages nurture, and then better expression of that talent, and more nurture in a virtuous cycle. Over time the hope is a nation that will have both rugby talent and the widespread rugby knowledge and culture to succeed.

Beka Saginadze is the epitome of a breed of big shouldered back rows with
a big engine to carry and tackle hard all game that Georgia produces a lot of

In a very different way, but the closest parallel of a rugby nation to Georgia is actually Fiji, just whilst one produces a surfeit of professional level props and tough work rate back rows, the other produces game breaking winger/centres and offloading loose forwards.

They are both the only two "Tier 2" nations who in the professional era produce domestic talent in the quantity and with the point of difference needed to get close to reaching the world top 10 with 90%+ homegrown squads (Georgia is not quite there yet at senior level but have been world top 10 six tournaments in a row at U20 level) up against "Tier 1" nations with enormous financial and competitive advantage over them.

(In the format of 7s which narrows down to emphasise a lot of Fiji's natural strengths they have long been one of the best in the world. If hypothetically there was some forward instead of outside back themed spinoff rugby format like "scrum wars" or "tackle kings" you can be assured Georgia would likewise win medals at that).

Georgia's rise cannot be a model for others to follow though. For the less genetically predisposed it takes a lot more money and sheer size of player numbers. For example it took years of Six Nations money and support for Italy to finally become a strong side with a more homegrown team. Rugby has gained an extra competitive nation in Georgia more by luck than necessarily great support, but for other Rugby Europe countries to be as good it will likely need more pro-active expansion from "Tier 1" blazers like was the case for Italy.