[1] This freestyle wrestling competition consisted of a single-elimination tournament, with a repechage used to determine the winners of two bronze medals.

Each wrestler who lost to one of the two finalists moved into the repechage, culminating in a pair of bronze medal matches featuring the semifinal losers each facing the remaining repechage opponent from their half of the bracket.

Each bout consisted of up to three rounds, lasting two minutes apiece.

On 29 August 2016, a report indicated that a retested sample for silver medalist Besik Kudukhov taken at the time of this event had returned a positive result (later disclosed as dehydrochlormethyltestosterone).

[2] On 27 October 2016, the IOC stated that they were unaware that Kudukhov had died in a car accident in December 2013 at the time the decision to include his samples in the re-analysis process was made.