The Belt in the State's Hand: Turkey's Presidential Cup and the Politics of Heritage Sport

Evening light spills across the greenery of Millet Bahçesi, and on either side of the carpet stand two men. Their bodies are slick with olive oil, they wear the heavy leather kıspet, and in the front row sits the head of state. The belt and the cup pass into the hands of Orhan Okulu. Standing with him are the Minister of Youth and Sports Osman Aşkın Bak, Deputy Minister Hamza Yerlikaya, and the president of the Turkish Traditional Wrestling Federation, İbrahim Türkiş. Before the final, good wishes were sent to both head wrestlers — Okulu and Mustafa Taş. The report delivered to me contains not one sentence of football. No club, no league, no transfer, no pressing trigger. And yet I have spent twenty-eight years writing about exactly those things — sitting on panel shows, arguing on podcasts. When the belt changed hands in front of the president, I understood that the real story was not Okulu's win. It was about which road a heritage sport travels to survive, who pays its bill, and what it hands back in return. Some context first, because from Bangladesh the picture is easily mistaken. Yağlı güreş — oil wrestling — is one of Turkey's oldest living sporting cultures. Wrestlers coat themselves in olive oil so that gripping an opponent becomes difficult, and they wear the kıspet, heavy leather trousers bound above the navel. Victory comes by pinning the opponent or turning him onto his back. The elite tier of the sport is the başpehlivan, the head wrestler. The largest name in Turkish history is Kırkpınar, where the golden belt is the emblem of the title. Holding the belt means remaining champion. The Presidential Cup — Cumhurbaşkanlığı Kupası — is a top-tier event of that tradition, its trophy tied to the Office of the President. Almost everything in this report is ceremonial: who came, who handed over the belt, who sent good wishes. Nothing about grip fighting, balance-breaking, or the move that decided the final. The attendance list includes Istanbul Governor Davut Gül and the president of the World Ethnosport Confederation, Bilal Erdoğan. The venue is Atatürk Airport Millet Bahçesi — part of the government's National Garden programme on the site of the former airport. What I noticed immediately, sitting in Dhaka, was not the sport but the structure. When funding, the trophy, and promotion all sit inside the same hand, the definition of success for that sport changes. Here the Ministry of Youth and Sports and the federation stage the event together and hand over the trophy together. In football's language we call this state interference, and FIFA and UEFA normally question it on grounds of federation autonomy. But in Turkey's constitutional reality, this is the norm. Before judging another country's framework through my own eyes, I have to read that framework's own rules. That caution matters for Bangladesh too, because our National Sports Council and federation debates usually go wrong in exactly this way. There is a signal here that can slip past the eye. The report refers to champions by weight classes, though the list itself is truncated. That implies the event uses weight-category structure, which does not match the classic başpehlivan model. Kırkpınar's tradition is one man at the top, everyone else behind him. Add weight classes and a single-winner ritual gradually shifts toward a standardised tournament — multiple titles instead of one, room for the competition to widen. That shift does not cheapen the sport. It is a survival strategy. A sport chasing international audiences, broadcast, and participation has to walk from ritual toward rulebook. The second signal is administrative, and for me the more interesting one. Deputy Minister Hamza Yerlikaya is not merely an official; he is an Olympic wrestling champion. The hands receiving the belt from Okulu belong to someone who knows the sport. In many national sports administrations, the decisions are made by people who never stepped onto the mat — and Turkish wrestling's chain is relatively free of that gap. It is a small but real advantage: the distance between policy and mat-side reality shrinks. In Bangladesh, the sharpest weakness in our federations is often precisely here, where the lines between election politics and the role of former athletes are blurry. The third signal is soft power. The presence of the World Ethnosport Confederation's president keeps this event from being purely a national festival; it points to an international export plan. The ethnosport idea is simple enough: gather heritage sports that cannot easily enter the Olympic or UNESCO model under a separate international umbrella, so that they can write their own rules. That is not only heritage protection; it is cultural diplomacy. A country that seats its folk sports inside an international network gains influence in a space where competition is still thin. Staging the event inside converted infrastructure like Millet Bahçesi sends two messages at once — we keep the old, we build the new. The fourth signal is economic, though it is psychology rather than arithmetic. The president's presence lifts a final to the altitude of national news. The professional market for oil wrestling is not large — the report carries no broadcast, sponsorship, or merchandise figures, so scale cannot be measured. But where the market is small, symbolic capital is expensive. A wrestler who wins a belt in front of the head of state attracts sponsors, invitations, and exhibition offers on a different level. I call this the presidential-attendance premium. For the runner-up, Mustafa Taş, that premium works in reverse — losing in front of such an audience makes the next season a revenge narrative, and the narrative itself becomes the marketing. The fifth signal is an absence. No information point carries a source, no outlet is named, no date is given. A text that lists full official titles and a complete attendance roll but carries no journalistic byline is usually not independent reporting; it is state protocol reporting. That is not evidence of wrongdoing; it is evidence of genre. My job is to recognise the genre and still use the facts without borrowing the author's assumptions. Now the Bangladeshi mirror, because that is where my real interest lives. The fate of heritage sport here is stuck on the same question — kabaddi, lathi khela, boli khela. The Banshkhali boli khela wakes an entire region for one day of the year, and for the other 364 days the sport barely has an institution. When state funding arrives, two things happen together: infrastructure and continuity appear, and decision-making moves closer to political hands. If you cannot separate those two, the question becomes unanswerable. Turkish oil wrestling has chosen a specific balance: the state pays, the federation writes rules, an international umbrella opens doors. It is not perfect. It is honest. Now I have to argue against myself, because a thesis that never faces its own objection is not an argument, it is advertising. My claim — that state patronage has kept the culture alive while narrowing governance independence — has a strong rebuttal. The world has watched market-driven sports die many times. If the commercial market is small, audiences thin, broadcast money absent, and the social base of a heritage sport erodes as villages move to cities, then without the state there is simply nothing. If Turkish oil wrestling still stands, if Kırkpınar still gathers thousands, if becoming başpehlivan still carries honour, then this patronage structure is at least one major reason. What I call a structural risk may be the sport's lifeline. I could also be wrong in another way. I assume high-level attendance means central control. In practice it may be something else — recognising a heritage sport as part of national history so that its social standing returns. Soft power and heritage preservation often become two names for the same work. The only way to tell them apart is documentation: who writes the rules, who runs the elections, what share of federation budget comes from the state. Until those answers exist, my claim is partial, not proven. And the evidence that would change my mind is clear: if the federation independently sets its calendar, appoints officials and controls revenue while the ministry only supplies infrastructure, I will withdraw my concern publicly, because I keep my wrong calls on the record. On the tactics of oil wrestling my comment is limited, and I admit it is limited. I have never stood on that mat; I sat down to write about it as a football observer. But twenty-eight years of watching the game taught me one thing: the result is always the top layer, and the funding-governance-promotion layer beneath it is the real story. I learned that once through a single number, in 2026, when I wrote about only two of the top twelve scorers in the Bangladesh Premier League being Bangladeshi. Everyone thought it was a coaching preference. It was structure. So I am entering two dated claims in this year's ledger. First: over the next 24 months, international heritage-sport events of the ethnosport type will increase in number, with Turkish oil wrestling positioned as one of its flagship products. Second: if the Presidential Cup really does use weight categories, the federation's next rulebook edition will state it more explicitly — because international promotion and weight classes are conditions of each other. The final question I keep for myself. When a state turns an old runway into a national garden and lays a carpet in the middle of it to celebrate heritage, is it saving its roots, or decorating a new project with a photograph of roots? The answer is not written on the belt. It is written in the federation's budget. And that is where my next piece begins. The sport did not ask me to legitimise it; it asked me to listen on its own lag — from wherever I can hear it.