FOR NOW, WELCOME BACK
Softball returns to Tokyo Games and will be absent in 2024 but hopes to stay thereafter
Thirteen years after it disappeared, an old Olympic friend is back.
Softball, dropped from the Games along with baseball after Beijing in 2008, will be played in Tokyo this month.
“I hope we put on a show and let the (International Olympic Committee) know that we deserve to be in the Olympic Games as a regular sport,” Monica Abbott said.
Abbott was 23 and fresh out of college at Tennessee when she pitched in her first Olympics in China. This summer, she’ll turn 36 while in Tokyo, where she and fellow lefthander Cat Osterman will be the veteran holdovers from the last Olympic team.
What if someone told her that final night in Beijing that she’d be back to lead an Olympic team more than a decade later?
“I don’t think I would have believed them,” said Abbott, who has played professionally in
Japan since 2009.
Thirteen years ago, the United States lost to Japan in the gold medal game. It was a gut punch, not only because the Americans lost the title for the first time in their sport’s short Olympic history — having won in 1996, 2000 and 2004 — but because they knew it was a farewell.
“It was a doubly soul-crushing feeling,” said Jessica Mendoza, the ESPN broadcaster whose Olympic career ended that night.
After the game, Mendoza and Abbott spelled out “2016” in softballs on the field, denoting the year they hoped that their sport would be reinstated. They were joined by the victorious Japanese and the bronze medalist Australians in an emotional message of unity.
But the return took far longer, and required the Olympics being held in Japan, a nation mad for baseball and softball. For now, the reprieve is only for Tokyo; both sports will be absent in Paris in 2024.
The European-centric IOC, mostly based in a part of the world where those sports aren’t popular, dropped softball and baseball in favor of rugby and golf. Softball suffered by being paired with baseball, which was viewed negatively because of Major League Baseball’s steroid scandal and the fact that the best players in baseball did not participate in the Olympics.
Yet, Olympic softball did bring the best players in their sport, did offer more opportunities for female athletes, had no steroid taint and was growing in popularity.
The hope now is that softball will return in 2028 in Los Angeles and for the 2032 Olympics.
Those Games are expected to be awarded to Brisbane, Australia, where softball is popular.
But the sport has suffered. While the collegiate game is thriving, and the Women’s College World Series breaks ratings records yearly, momentum around the world has stalled.
“There’s a lost generation in softball,” Abbott said. “Without the Olympic Games, there has been little chance to have a fulltime career in softball.”
Abbott and Osterman are letting their younger teammates know what the Olympic experience is like. The roster was picked in 2019 and hasn’t changed despite the delay. The pandemic hit while the team was on tour; they stayed in touch through video conference meetings. In the fall, some players, like Abbott who plays for Toyota, went to Japan to play. They reunited for a training camp in January.
“Every older athlete knows that another year throws more life obstacles in your way,” Abbott said. “There are more life circumstances and demands.”
She’s had some of her own. Abbott got engaged during the pandemic but won’t wed until after the Olympics. She is also undecided about how long she will continue to play in Japan.
But she’s healthy and eager for an Olympic return. For now, her knowledge of the country is another asset she shares during Olympic preparations.
Mendoza, who starred at Stanford, will join NBC in Japan to broadcast the competition.
“I really wanted to be there,” she said. “It’s so important.”
Mendoza said it “trips her out” that the young teammates she had in 2008 are still playing.
“I have so much pride that Cat and Monica are that last connection,” she said. “That’s a long hand held over the generations.”
In retrospect, softball’s appearance in the Olympics was a blip. The sport made a splash in its debut at the Atlanta Games in 1996, making stars of players such as Dot Richardson and Michele Smith. They were part of the summer of American women, who won gold medals in several team sports and became an illustration of the results of Title IX, passed 24 years earlier.
But by 2008, four Olympics later, the sport was deemed expendable.
“We didn’t have a chance,” Mendoza said. “We never really got going.”
Another seven-year hiatus, between this summer and the 2028 Olympics, is troubling. But at least softball is back at the Olympics.
For now.