The Wrestler (sculpture)

This 66-centimetre (26 in)-high Mesoamerican statuette was discovered in 1933 by a farmer in Arroyo Sonso, in the Mexican state of Veracruz near the Rio Uxpanapa and not far from its confluence with the Coatzacoalcos River, an area now known as Antonio Plaza.

[3] The head is bald, but it lacks the highly stylized cranial deformation found in many Olmec figurines or the wooden busts of El Manati.

[3] The figure wears only a lightly outlined loincloth, leading to the supposition that the statuette originally was dressed in ritualistic clothing that has perished with the passage of time.

[4] The figure clearly is more free-flowing than other three-dimensional Olmec sculptures (than, for example, San Martin Pajapan Monument 1), which frequently are boxy and seemingly "confined" by the medium from which they are carved.

[1] Based on similarities with Jacques le Moyne's painting of a 16th-century Timucua ritual, art historian Roy Craven suggests that the figure is that of a shaman,[6] although this proposal has received little notice.

The sculpture falls outside the norms for much of the known Olmec art:[10] The art historian Nancy Kelker of Middle Tennessee State University argues that a vague provenance, atypical stone, unusual carving of the back, nonstandard posture, recent publication of scholarly material on Olmec jades, and an urgent interest among Mexicans to find a myth for their origin in antiquity all suggest that it is a modern sculpture.

[18] In 1996, the government of the United Mexican States issued a one-ounce silver coin bearing the image of the sculpture on its obverse, one of six in the Olmec cultural set.