WRESTLING DOWN FOR THE COUNT

CALGARY ATHLETES LAMENT MOVE TO DROP SPORT FROM 2020 GAMES

Sports can be wonderful; it’s the people who run them who can be hell. FIFA lets match-fixing bloom and spread without apparent penalty; Roger Goodell goes on television the morning of the Super Bowl and refuses to link football and concussions. Sports have mushroomed into galactically valuable global properties, and the stakes and rewards are high enough that people who might have had the requisite venality for politics decide that sports might be worth their time, instead.

This line of thinking invariably leads to the International Olympic Committee, whose 14-member executive committee voted Tuesday to recommend the removal of wrestling from the Summer Games starting in 2020, despite wrestling’s inclusion in every modern Olympics but one since 1896.

The international wrestling federation, FILA, said in a statement it was “greatly astonished;” the president of Wrestling Canada, Don Ryan, said he was “deeply surprised” and they were not alone. The sport that escaped the axe, modern pentathlon, dates back to barons and cavalry. Wrestling, a part of both the ancient and modern Games, dates back to the caves.

In fairness, members of the IOC don’t usually wrestle with anything, up to and including their collective conscience. For the most part, wrestling belongs to nations that can snarl: Azerbaijanis and Uzbeks, Russians and Ukrainians, Iranians, South Koreans, the Japanese, Cubans, Americans, Turks. In women’s wrestling, Japan, China and Eastern Europe have been the strongest and Canada has done well, winning five medals since 2004 (Canada’s last men’s wrestling medal was Daniel Igali’s gold in 2000 in Sydney, and we have won eight wrestling medals since 1992).

But mostly, wrestling resembles weightlifting: a room full of large men, often with moustaches, shouting and in need of a cigarette. It’s where you found eight of the 29 Mongol athletes at the Games in London, and that’s no accident. Wrestling came from the caves because it costs nothing and now, as then, the venues are cheap — any hall can be a wrestling hall with minor, temporary modifications — and any nation can participate. Wrestling is old, is simple and difficult and doesn’t require the extravagance of a weapon or a horse. Twenty-nine different nations won wrestling medals in London.

But it also doesn’t have a superstar — not since Rulon Gardner of the U.S. toppled the Russian colossus Alexander Karelin — and it is not in the X Games. And the executive committee was not a list of wrestling nations: IOC president Jacques Rogge, the aristocratic Belgian, was joined by representative cronies from Singapore, Germany, Morocco, Great Britain, Australia, South Africa, Sweden, Chinese Taipei, Switzerland, Ireland, Germany again, Spain, Ukraine and Guatemala. Only Germany, Ukraine and Sweden have won wrestling medals in the past 20 years. Geography matters.

And according to Inside The Games’ Duncan Mackay, the vote was not close — five front-runners emerged as the field was winnowed: wrestling, modern pentathlon, canoeing, field hockey and taekwondo — and wrestling received eight votes for elimination; field hockey and pentathlon each received three.

Rogge recently visited South Korea in advance of the 2018 Winter Games, and was asked by South Korea president-elect Park Geun Hye to keep taekwondo on the program. Field hockey’s recent medal winners include Germany, Spain, Australia and Great Britain. The committee was given a list of 39 criteria but no formal ranking, meaning that essentially you could vote any way you wanted to.

Coincidentally, Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., whose father was the president of the IOC from 1980 to 2001, is the vice-president of the modern pentathlon federation and is on the IOC executive board. He told the AP that “tradition is one of our strongest assets, but we are also a multi-sport discipline that produces very complete people.” This is inarguable. Those wealthy enough to participate become proficient with skills which could one day be used to keep down the rabble in, say, a world without gasoline.

Which meant that wrestling was the sucker at the table. To be fair, wrestling is not the most TV friendly sport. When I covered it in London, I relied on the Toronto Sun’s Steve Buffery to point out its subtleties, of which there were many.

But along with the marathon, wrestling is a fundamental plank of the Olympics and belongs in any measure of human sport. These are modern, lucrative times, however, and this was the aristocrats with their horses and epées outmanoeuvring the suckers in the caves. It tells you everything about the IOC that it is dropping wrestling, keeping modern pentathlon and adding golf.

“It’s not a case of what’s wrong with wrestling,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams told reporters in Lausanne, Switzerland. “It’s what’s right with the core sports.”

The Olympics loves the ritual of its traditions — the Olympic flag, Greece entering the stadium first, the recitation of the Olympic charter, on and on. But like FIFA, it is a ruthless global cartel at its heart. It will award Olympic Games to China and Russia, human rights be damned. It will follow the money.

This hurts Canada, of course. Daniel Igali used wrestling to leave Nigeria and come to Canada, and he won gold for us in 2000, and has used his platform to make a positive difference in the world. The Russianborn, Toronto-based Khetag Pliev used wrestling to help dig out of homelessness and depression. Carol Huynh and Tonya Verbeek have represented us proudly.

But wrestling is out, left behind by such core sports as trampoline, table tennis, badminton, taekwondo — a kicking contest that is far more impenetrable to the casual viewer, and beset by judging controversies to boot — synchronized swimming and modern pentathlon, which is neither modern not a pentathlon since the running and shooting aspects were combined.

Next, wrestling will compete with baseball and softball, karate, squash, roller sports — roller sports! — sport climbing, wakeboarding and wushu for one slot in 2020, but Olympic experts note that once a sport is dropped, it is hard to come back.

The venal politicians who run this particular cartel seem content to consign this sport to the past and that’s the Games for you. Wrestling can belong to anybody. The Olympics, not so much.