GEORGE Ramm has set his sights on blazing a trail for up-and-coming young wrestlers in this country after confirming his place as Britain's number one.

The 19-year-old Harwood wrestler won the senior 61kg national title at the recent English Championships, but passed up the chance to try to qualify for the Rio Olympics to compete for the European and world junior crowns later this year.

After completing his final season as a junior, the Sharples Wrestling Club member will then go all out to win Commonwealth gold in 2018 before taking on the world's best at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

If Ramm is to realise his dream, he accepts he will have to do it without the funding afforded to British athletes in other mainstream Olympic sports, such as swimming, cycling, rowing and boxing.

The Bolton teenager has spent the last year living hand-to-mouth training and wrestling in Austria, Ukraine and Sweden, getting by on a £1,000 grant from Sport England as well as nearly £4,000 from an anonymous donor who responded to a crowdfunding page he set up.

He has also had to put his studies on the backburner after being forced to miss his final A Level exams in 2014 to compete at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

Yet if Ramm can reach his medal goal on the international stage in the coming years, he hopes other young UK wrestlers will not have to make the same kinds of sacrifices to be successful.

"It's a fun thing to do, to travel around Europe, see new places and train with different people, but it would be nice to stay at home and train," he said.

"Sadly, we just don't have the quality of training partners to bring us on.

"One of the reasons I am having to work so hard is because everyone in the UK is at a disadvantage to wrestlers from other countries, who can train full time and have so much more support than we do.

"So I am doing this, not just for me but for the future of wrestling in this country.

"If we can start to win regular medals in the Olympics and Commonwealth Games then hopefully there will be more money for the younger wrestlers coming through to help bring them on.

"So by the time they are 19, 20 and 21 they will be even better than our current crop of wrestlers.

"If you get the proper support and funding from the start there is no reason why we can't start to compete and beat the best wrestlers in the world."

Ramm believes he has come on leaps and bounds over the past year after seeking out better training partners on the continent.

He demonstrated that progress by beating Scotland's Viorel Etko, who he lost to in the quarter-finals of the Commonwealth Games, on his way to the English title.

The national crown followed a silver medal at the prestigious Grensland Tournament in Holland and a gold at the Jovenas Promesas in Spain.

He also won nine out of 10 bouts while fighting for KSK Klaus in the Austrian Bundesliga between September and December last year, and finished fifth in the Kiev Outstanding Memorial Tournament during a three-month training block in Ukraine at the start of this year.

Team GB coach, Ukrainian Anatolii Kharytoniuk, arranged for Ramm to train for free in Kiev, although he had to pay for his own board, food and travel, and he was given lodgings with club members in Austria, where he was paid up to 200 euros a fight.

Since March, Ramm has been living with girlfriend Jessica Blaszka – a 23-year-old Dutch Olympic wrestler – while they trained with the Sweden national team.

He plans to remain based in Sweden for the remainder of the summer, in between British training camps in Ukraine, as well as trips to the European Junior Championships in Romania next month, the Spanish Grand Prix in Madrid in July and the World Junior Championships in Macon, France, in August.

Ramm recently signed a contract to fight for Dutch side KSV Simpson from September to December in the third tier of the German Bundesliga, when he will live with his girlfriend in Holland and train full-time with the German national team.

The long-term goal is to be picked up by a team in the top league of the Bundesliga, where the world's best wrestlers get paid hundreds of euros for each fight.

But Ramm, who has spent just three weeks at his Harwood home over the past year, says he will need full-time sponsorship to continue with his plans, and dreams of a day when UK wrestlers are properly funded and able to train and live in the UK.

"I’ve tried many different ways to get money and there just isn’t anything," he said.

"I have been lucky though. I set up a crowdfunding page and somebody did donate close to £3,000, just an anonymous donation.

"That person has actually donated again – three times – when I have needed money.

"It’s only because of that person I have been able to keep doing what I’m doing.

"If you win an Olympic medal you would get money, but it’s not crazy money like athletics and boxing, where you get big endorsements.

"But it’s not about that really, it’s about wanting to do it. If you love the sport you would do it without any money.

"If I just had a pair of shorts and wrestling boots and no money I would still wrestle.

"It shouldn't have to be that way, though.

"I want to make myself known and give myself a good chance, but I also want to help others. There are young wrestlers in the UK now who are really good. I look at them and think 'they are better than I was when I was that age'.

"We are getting better wrestlers, but it's when they hit 13, 14 that maybe their focus switches more to their studies because they don't see any money or future in the sport.

"It's critical at that stage that they get more support and a little bit of money so they can keep training, and then we will get medals."

Ramm's passion for the sport is clear, and he has a host of ideas on the way forward for British wrestling

"If we promote wrestling more, more people will wrestle, the more people wrestle the more partners you have and the more partners you have the more chance you will get of being successful," he said.

"If you have 100 wrestlers, you will get maybe one or two who are good enough to wrestle at international level.

"If you have 10,000 wrestlers you have much more chance of finding people who are going to be good enough.

"That's why in countries like Russia, where wrestling is the national sport and tens of thousands of people are wrestling, they have more quality wrestlers than we do.

"In the long term, I feel we need a better set-up and better training facilities.

"We could certainly do with more national training sessions, so everyone in Britain who is in the national team can come and train together.

"We only have them one or two times every couple of months. It would be better if we had that more often.

"To get that, we need to publicise the sport more.

"It's a bit like a dead sport, all you hear about is your mainstream sports - diving, swimming, athletics, boxing and stuff like that. You don't really see or hear about wrestling. It's not on TV so they could do so much more to promote it.

"They could do a lot more to help the wrestlers and support the way they are going, if people like me can make that step up and win some big medals, that is key.

"After that we need to capitalise on the extra publicity by going out into schools and colleges to try to get more people involved."