Wrestling dropped from the Olympic program?
A Stupid Decision That Makes No Sense by Joe Brackets
Wrestling? The IOC looked at all 26 sports on the Olympic program, decided on one to eliminate, and picked wrestling? While keeping modern pentathlon and taekwondo? To say I’m shocked and disappointed would be an understatement. I was so confident in wrestling’s place on the Olympic program that I figured it wouldn’t even enter into the discussion. The decision to drop it is simply mind-boggling. And it makes you wonder what the IOC’s real motivation was.
For starters, let’s put this in a historical context. Wrestling has been in the Olympics since the beginning. In fact, Carl Schumann, who won the gold medal in wrestling at the 1896 Games, also won three gold medals in gymnastics and competed in the shot put, long jump and triple jump that year. But wrestling goes back even further than that. It was one of the four sports contested in the Ancient Olympics. That means wrestling has been an Olympic sport longer than any other (with the exception of track & field and boxing). You want historical significance? How’s that for ya? What other sport can trace its Olympic history back to 708 BC?
Now let’s look at the universality element. The IOC likes sports that have wide participation around the world. Wrestling certainly meets this criterion. The sport is generally dominated by athletes from Russia, the United States and Iran (and the Japanese women). But in London, medals were also won by competitors from Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, North Korea, South Korea, Egypt, Canada, Hungary, India, Sweden, Armenia, Estonia, Lithuania, France, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Poland, Puerto Rico, Turkey, China, Mongolia, Colombia, Bulgaria and Spain. A total of 71 countries sent wrestlers to London, including such obscure nations as American Samoa, Guam, Micronesia, Namibia, Madagascar, Central African Republic and Vietnam.
Women’s wrestling was only added to the Olympics in 2004. To much fanfare. Including the freestyle and Greco-Roman disciplines, there were 18 wrestling events in 2012. With roughly 16 competitors in each event, that’s approximately 300 athletes. Whatever sport is added to replace wrestling won’t come anywhere near those numbers for participation. And it’s highly unlikely there’ll be representatives from more nations.
Sagging TV ratings were one of the primary reasons cited for wrestling’s Olympic demise. Wrestling’s never going to be as popular as sports such as beach volleyball. (Think about it, which would you rather watch: hot women in bikinis or large, hairy Russian men wrapped in a giant bear hug for five minutes?) But, in the United States at least, wrestling is still featured heavily on Olympic telecasts, so the TV ratings couldn’t have been that terrible. They also looked at things like ticket sales and anti-doping policy. While I don’t know how wrestling fared in those two areas (although, no wrestlers had medals stripped because of positive tests in London), you can’t tell me the scores were so poor that it was enough to override all of the overwhelming positives.
More importantly, let’s compare wrestling to modern pentathlon, which was the sport pretty much everyone just assumed would be the one to go, in those areas. Modern pentathlon only has two events, so it’s impossible for more than six nations to medal. Worldwide participation? The number of competitors in both the men’s and women’s event in London was 36. That’s 72 athletes. Or, one more than the number of nations that entered wrestlers in the 2012 Olympics. TV ratings and ticket sales? Name one country where modern pentathlon is actually popular. And let’s not forget that, until the proposed and still somewhat confusing one-venue proposal for Rio, modern pentathlon is held in three or four different venues, making it virtually impossible to follow the entire competiton.
The only thing that modern pentathlon had going for it was historical significance. The sport was created by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the Modern Olympics, which might’ve been its saving grace. Another thing in modern pentathlon’s favor? The vice president of the International Modern Pentathlon Union is Juan Antonio Samaranch, Jr., the son of the longtime IOC president. His influence is significant and wide-reaching. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there were also some back-room deals made to save modern pentathlon’s place at the Olympic table.
If there’s anything more surprising than the decision to drop wrestling, it’s that the third sport in the final round of elimination talks was field hockey. From the various articles I’ve read today, it seems like field hockey’s biggest problem is that too many IOC members view it as a sport whose reach is limited mainly to the British Commonwealth (even though the gold medalists in London were the German men and Dutch women, and Argentina’s women’s team is one of the best in the world). That’s the same thing that doomed baseball and softball in 2005, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the reason field hockey ended up on the bubble.
As puzzling and disappointing the elimination of wrestling from the list of “core” Olympic sports is, the good news is this isn’t the end. Wrestling still has a chance to be reinstated. It’s now on a list that includes squash, karate, roller sports, wakeboarding, sport climbing, something known as wushu and baseball/softball, one of which will be added to the 2020 program for a full slate of 28 sports. (For the record, I think six of these nine sports should be in the Olympics.)
Hopefully the worldwide reaction of shock, disbelief and disgust will be enough to bring the IOC to its senses. Wrestling didn’t deserve to get booted from the Olympic Games. And if it will indeed be gone after 2016, more than just the sport will suffer. The entire Olympic Movement will suffer. And at what cost?
This is a misguided decision that makes little to no sense. They eliminated the wrong sport. The worst part is they probably know it. Fortunately, the IOC still has a chance to rectify it. As long as they aren’t stupid enough to get in their own way again. But, knowing the IOC, it’s more likely that wrestling won’t be contested at the 2020 Games. And that’s just an outright shame.
