Wrestling left to grapple with a huge problem
Sport has been dropped from Olympic roster in 2000
Wrestling Canada president Don Ryan thought it was a joke when he woke up Tuesday to frantic messages about his sport being dropped from the Olympic Games. He soon found out the fear was all too real. The International Olympic Committee’s executive board voted in Lausanne, Switzerland, to drop wrestling, one of the world’s oldest sports, from the 2020 Games to make room for another sport.
“It came as a complete surprise,” Ryan said on a conference call. “We had great meetings at the London Games, sold out arenas.
“We had no indication. That’s why I thought someone was telling a joke.”
Freestyle wrestling has been one of Canada’s strong Summer Games events since Daniel Igali won gold in Sydney, Australia, in 2000.
Since women’s wrestling was included at Athens in 2004, Carol Huynh of Hazelton, B.C. and Tonya Verbeek of Grimsby, Ont., have combined for five medals, including Huynh’s gold in Beijing in 2008.
Wrestlers will compete at the 2016 Games in Rio De Janeiro, but losing Olympic status in 2020 would be a major blow to an event that’s been contested since the first modern Games in 1896.
It was thought modern pentathlon or taekwondo would get the axe, but the IOC executive instead made the surprise choice to remove wrestling from its list of 25 “core” sports. The 15member executive reviews all sports after each Olympics to see which should be kept on.
Ryan cautioned that the executive’s decision is only a recommendation.
He said the sport’s governing body, the International Federation of Associated Wrestling Styles, would lobby to keep it from being ratified at an IOC meeting in September.
There is also a meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May where the IOC executive will hear presentations from seven sports that hope to be included as “additional” events in 2020.
Other sports vying for spots in the 2020 Games are baseball/softball, karate, squash, wushu (Kung Fu), roller sports, sport climbing and wakeboarding.
Baseball was dropped after the 2008 Games and is a long shot to be reinstated. Once dropped, it’s unlikely wrestling would be brought back right away.
Golf and rugby sevens were added in as “additional” sports to the 2016 Olympics.
“It’s the IOC trying to change the Olympics to make it more mainstream and more viewerfriendly instead of sticking to what they founded the Olympics on, and that was basically amateur sports,” former Olympic champion Rulon Gardner of the U.S. told The Associated Press.
In London, 344 athletes competed in 11 medal events in freestyle and seven in Greco-Roman.
The 25 core summer sports are track and field, rowing, badminton, basketball, boxing, canoeing, cycling, equestrian, fencing, football, gymnastics, weightlifting, handball, field hockey, judo, swimming, modern pentathlon, taekwondo, tennis, table tennis, shooting, archery, triathlon, sailing and volleyball.
Modern pentathlon, which has been contested since 1912, was considered the most vulnerable sport but hard lobbying from its federation kept it in the Games. It includes fencing, horse riding, swimming, running and shooting.
It benefited from the work of Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., the son of the former IOC president who is a federation vice-president and member of the IOC board.