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Despite the best efforts of Roy Slaven and HG Nelson, wrestling is the sort of sport which is not really made for television.

To the uninitiated, it looks like two men wearing boots and rather modest swimming suits writhing around on the floor inside a pair of large, coloured, concentric circles.

It's little wonder that it doesn't translate well to the small screen.

But to the aficionado, it is as much an artform as a sport, and one with a long and rich history.

It is perhaps understandable that wrestling is the world's oldest competitive sport. It requires no equipment, just physical strength, flexibility and tactical nouse.

Wrestling dates back thousands of years, and was one of the staples - the main event in some cases - at the ancient Olympics.

Keen to draw on this tradition, the organisers of the early modern Olympics reintroduced the sport in the form of greco-roman wrestling, in which combatants use only their arms and upper bodies.

It proved popular enough for a second form of the sport - freestyle - to be introduced in 1904.

This discipline allows wrestlers to use their legs to push, lift or trip, and allows combatants to grab one another above or below the waist.

It can be spectacular, resembling judo in some of its moves.

While the two forms of wrestling differ in style, the object of each remains the same - to pin the opponent's shoulders to the mat.

If one competitor manages to pin the other for a full second, as counted by the judges, he wins the bout.

There was a time when the bout would continue until a competitor was pinned.

This gave Olympic sport one of its longest lasting events. In 1912, Estonia's Martin Klein met Finland's Alfred Asikainen in what was obviously an evenly matched bout - it lasted 11 hours and 40 minutes before Klein finally pinned Asikainen.

Klein was so exhausted after the match he was unable to compete for gold the following day.

These days competition takes place over two three-minute rounds.

The action takes place on a four-centimetre thick mat covered with vinyl on which two concentric circles are marked, one seven metres in diameter and another nine metres across.

The seven-metre wide circle is called the central wrestling area while the area between its outer edge and the extremities of the nine-metre circle is called the passivity zone, which serves to warn wrestlers they are nearing the edge of the competition zone.

The central wrestling area is coloured yellow while the passivity zone is red.

A new chapter in the sport's rich history was written in 2004 in Athens when women were allowed to compete for the first time. They take part in freestyle wrestling only.