Davis grad Cam Guerin set to compete for Olympic wrestling spot

This week’s Olympic Trials for this summer’s Paris games offer another chance for Yakima’s Cameron Guerin to chase one of the few goals she’s yet to accomplish in amateur wrestling.

The unbeaten four-time state champion at Davis and four-time National Collegiate Women’s Wrestling Championship winner for McKendree University qualified to compete in the women’s freestyle 57 kilogram (125.7 pounds) challenge tournament at Penn State University, scheduled for April 19 and 20. It will be the second Trials appearance for Guerin, who finished fourth as a 20-year-old in the 57-kilo bracket four years ago.

This time around she’s just turned 24 and thanks to a fifth-place finish at the 2023 Senior Nationals, Guerin will be one of eight competitors in the one-day challenge tournament. The winner advances to face Senior World medalist Helen Maroulis — the 53-kilo gold medalist at the 2016 Rio Olympics and 57-kilo bronze medalist at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 — in a best-of-three match with a trip to the 2024 Paris Olympics on the line.

Guerin earned the No. 9 seed in the challenge tournament and will open against U17 world team member Shelby Moore, who beat Guerin by a 3-2 decision at Senior Nationals last December. The winner advances to a quarterfinal matchup against No. 1 seed Xochitl Mota-Pettis, a 2023 champion at the Pan-American games and the US Open.

A 2-1 win over King University’s Maria Victoria Baez Dilone in last month’s 130-pound national championship final marked the closest anyone’s gotten to defeating Guerin in the NCWWC tournament during a 16-0 run that included four pins and nine technical falls. Guerin told the Cedar Rapids Gazette she plans to take advantage of her extra COVID year and go for a fifth national title in 2025.

That would put an exclamation point on a college career that started nearly three years after she won her last Washington state title, since Guerin spent two years at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs before it was shut down by the pandemic in March 2020. Guerin, who competes for the prestigious Titan Mercury Wrestling Club, first qualified for Team USA as a junior in 2017.