With a cooling vest and a kettle: how Fabian Staudenmann becomes the new face of wrestling

Everything comes together. This includes the story of Fabian Staudenmann, currently the country's best wrestler, the 2023 Best of the Year, the 2024 Best of the Year , the winner of the 2024 Federal Jubilee Wrestling Festival, and the most frequently mentioned contender for the title of King in 2025. The face of wrestling. Thanks to Staudenmann, the Bernese dominate the scene, which is so characterized by competition between regional and cantonal associations.

Everything would have been different if two young people from Graubünden hadn't traveled to the Bernese region in 1968. Fides and Georges Renggli were running two restaurants on the Bernina Pass when they felt the urge to move on. They searched for advertisements and found the "Sternen" in Guggisberg.

Guggisberg, near Bern, near Thun, near Freiburg. Each city is a good half hour away, within reach, yet far away.

Fides and Georges Renggli traveled from Bernina to Guggisberg in a grey VW Beetle, and when they stopped in front of the "Sternen", Georges asked about the price and signed the contract.

Today, Fides Renggli is over 90 years old. She still occasionally hikes to the Guggershörnli, the landmark of Guggisberg, a sublime vantage point that reveals what is within reach yet far away. And Fides Renggli is Fabian Staudenmann's great-grandmother, who still pays him a fiver for his successes.

It's early July, and Staudenmann is sitting in the "Sternen" restaurant, a full plate in front of him, his grandparents, the current "Sternen" innkeepers, beside him, and all sorts of bells he won as a wrestler. Visit home, break.

He grew up in Guggisberg and now lives in Bern. Before the season, he said: "I won't do anything that could jeopardize my success." He has already won three festivals in 2025, most recently the Bernese Oberland in Adelboden at the end of June. He skipped a race on July 6th to rest and do nothing. Next weekend, he will compete in the Bernese Cantonal, the festival of this association, which is only his association because his great-grandparents once left Graubünden.

Guggisberg has the Guggershörnli (Guggershörnli) and the legendary "Guggisberglied" (Guggisberg song) about the sad love story of Vreneli and Hansjoggeli. But Guggisberg doesn't have a wrestling club. Guggisberg is a sprawling municipality with many small hamlets and just under 1,500 residents (as of 2024). More than 100 people are named Zbinden, and Staudenmann is the seventh most common surname in Guggisberg.

Fabian Staudenmann, born in 2000, joined the junior team of a local ski club as a boy and knew what wrestling was all about. He had no greater enthusiasm than that. Until he saw the final bout of the Swiss Wrestling and Alpine Festival in 2010, with Bernese Kilian Wenger winning. Shortly thereafter, a wrestling taster day was held in the larger neighboring town of Schwarzenburg, and Staudenmann gave it a try – and joined the Schwarzenburg Wrestling Club.

Staudenmann says he never explicitly considered Wenger a role model, "but for me, he represented the face of wrestling." Staudenmann considers how to say something. He ponders why his career has developed the way it has so far. He recounts the tip from his godmother, who, after a sobering day as a young wrestler, motivated him to train with her partner, a nationally renowned triathlete, Stefan Riesen.

"And then something happened that's the best thing for a young person," says Staudenmann. "I did one more training session – and my performance improved. And I did a second more training session – and my performance improved even further. I saw the connection between effort and reward, more input, more output. For a 13- or 14-year-old, such an insight is crucial. When someone tells you you have to do more, you don't believe it – but when you notice it yourself . . ."

The young wrestler Staudenmann defined his career goal: a federal crown. When someone asked why he no longer strived to become wrestling champion, for example, Staudenmann replied that luck was also needed for that.

In spring 2019, Staudenmann made it to a final round for the first time, in the Emmental, against Curdin Orlik. Orlik, of all people, was a Graubünden native who, like Staudenmann's grandparents, moved from Graubünden to Bern and stayed there. Victory for Orlik, disappointment for Staudenmann. Orlik, however, told him: "At the end of August, no one asks who won the Emmental."

At the end of August 2019, Staudenmann won his first federal wreath, becoming only the second Guggisberg resident after Walter Hürst. Hürst was a farmer who ran the business with his brother and trained in his own wrestling cellar on the farm. He won four federal wreaths, in 1948, 1950, 1956, and 1958, when Staudenmann's great-grandparents didn't even know where Guggisberg was.

At the end of August 2019, no one was thinking about that; and no one asked who had won the Emmental Championship – only Staudenmann wondered: "And now what?" He had achieved his goal, at the age of 19, and felt disoriented. He is still convinced that he would have had "a terrible year for wrestling" in 2020 if the coronavirus pandemic hadn't paralyzed competitive sport and almost every aspect of his life. Through the elite sports competition, he met Matthias Glarner , the 2016 wrestling champion, and he learned what it means to train hard.

Since then, he's been working steadily under Glarner's instructions. Glarner let Staudenmann know early on that he "already had two or three more goals in mind" for him. It was perhaps a hidden promise—and certainly a subtle assurance of how much Glarner believed in him.

Glarner sees Staudenmann as a "steam engine" because he's the type of athlete who "goes his own way" once he knows where he wants to go. Glarner published a book titled "Dream Big" – Staudenmann says: "I'm happy to add to that title. Yes, you can dream big, but you have to be willing to pay the price." Input, output.

In the 2023 season, he won seven Kranzfeste and lost a single bout: against Samuel Giger in the first round of the Unspunnen Festival, the last and biggest event of the year. Glarner and Staudenmann considered it the most important round of the season because it showed what was missing.

The memories of the defeat filled Staudenmann with motivation. But there was also a void: After such a successful year, Staudenmann didn't feel the emotions he had expected. After all the years of work and preparation, he had expected more, more luck, more joy. Instead, thoughts of the only defeat and the question of why he didn't feel any differently dominated his mind.

Since then, a psychologist has been part of the Staudenmann team. And now there's also a media coordinator who bundles requests so that Staudenmann doesn't have appointments here and there every two weeks. The steam locomotive knows what it wants and where it wants to go. Staudenmann is studying mathematics at the University of Bern, but this season he's not doing anything that could jeopardize his success.

Experts have also found Staudenmann to be remarkably scientific for a wrestler. When it was particularly hot at wrestling festivals this year, Staudenmann wore cooling vests. He says: "There are studies that show that cooling the torso up to fifteen minutes before a performance results in a performance increase of a few percent in the first two minutes of exertion."

Staudenmann tried to adjust his diet on competition day, "what do you eat, how, when?", which posed a particular challenge when a fight took place every hour and a half. As he walked across the wrestling arena with a kettle, the others asked him if he served coffee. No, they were talking about consuming rice and chicken, which were easier to digest when cooked with hot water.

His wrestling club colleague Severin Schwander has "also jumped on the bandwagon," says steam locomotive Staudenmann. Schwander completed his chef apprenticeship with Staudenmann's grandfather at the "Sternen" restaurant and is a certified master butcher. Products from the Schwander butcher shop have won multiple gold medals. Schwander brings the chicken to the wrestling festivals, vacuum-packed in portions and low in fat.

Staudenmann says that wrestling is still in its infancy that it offers many opportunities to help shape it – "as a wrestler, you have a responsibility to get things done; not everything is handed to you." This is how Staudenmann drives himself and others forward, and perhaps the sport as well. After all, he is the face of wrestling, isn't he? "No," says Staudenmann. He recently told a colleague that it was "somehow incomprehensible" that the younger Bernese wrestlers looked up to them, "we're still just kids."

He himself has the greatest respect for Florian Gnägi, Thomas Sempach and Bernhard Kämpf, who finish festival after festival behind Staudenmann, but who were already wrestling well when he wasn't even a member of a wrestling club - "this feeling of respect will probably never really go away."

These are questions of roles, of self-reflection. The child thinks further and says: "The craziest thing for me is the conflict between car drivers and cyclists. When I'm in the car, I get annoyed by the cyclists – and when I'm on the bike twenty minutes later, I get annoyed by the car drivers. And both times, I think I'm one hundred percent right."

There are those who think Staudenmann could be a little more forthcoming, and they're probably one hundred percent right. But perhaps 2025 just isn't the time. In 2023, as winter was winding down and the wrestling season was starting, he still participated in the ski club's race. In the first run, he "rolled over," as he put it, but he remained uninjured.

This year, he's doing nothing that could jeopardize his (Schwing) success and skipped the ski club race, while his younger brother won. His brother works in the business that Fabian supports as a car sponsor—and since his retirement, also employs Kilian Wenger, the former face of wrestling. Everything's coming together.

Staudenmann says: "With a goal in mind, I demonstrate a great willingness to suffer." The goal is the title of king at the end of August in Mollis, so close and yet so far away, right? "No," says Staudenmann. "If I were to say I wanted to become king, it would at most be a statement, not a goal."

Staudenmann sees things no differently than he did as a young wrestler, when he said he wasn't striving for the title of champion because that also required luck. But he also knows that by the end of August, no one will ask how much he's done to minimize his need for luck.