Why NO wrestling in 2020 Olympics ?

Wrestling, an Olympic sport since the first Games in ancient Greece, looks set to be dropped after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) voted to remove it from the programme for 2020. The IOC executive board decided to retain modern pentathlon the event considered most at risk and remove wrestling instead from its list of 25 core sports. Women’s wrestling was added to the Olympics at the 2004 Athens Games. The sport which featured 344 athletes’ competing in 11 medal events in free style and seven in Greco-Roman at last year’s London Olympics will now join seven other sports in applying for inclusion in 2020. The others are a combined bid from base-ball and soft-ball, karate, squash, roller sports, sport climbing, wake boarding and wushu. They will be vying for a single opening in 2020.

Though this decision is not final and another round of discussions and voting will be done in September this year let us look at the in-depth analysis of why wrestling have become doubtful according to veteran observers of the Games. The IOC program commission report analyzed more than three dozen criteria, including television ratings, ticket sales, anti-doping policy and global participation and popularity. Olympic-style wrestling, with its amateur roots and absence of visibility except during the Games, does not have superstars with widespread international acclaim like Lionel Messi in soccer, Kobe Bryant in basketball, Tiger Woods in golf and Usain Bolt in track. And in the United States, the popularity of Olympic-style wrestling is surpassed by the staged bombast of professional wrestling. With no official rankings or recommendations contained in the report, the final decision by the 15-member board was also subject to political, emotional and sentimental factors.

In recent years, the I.O.C. has expressed concern about the growing size of the Summer Games and has wanted to cap the number of athletes at about 10,500. It has also said that it wants to attract younger viewers to the international television audience. On Tuesday, the committee said in a statement that it wanted to ensure that it remained “relevant to sports fans of all generations.” The I.O.C. may have also grown frustrated that Greco-Roman wrestling did not include women, experts said. Women began participating in freestyle wrestling at the 2004 Athens Games. 

Many argue that politics, too, play an inevitable role in the workings of the I.O.C. Among the sports surviving the voting was modern pentathlon which was also threatened, and less popular internationally than wrestling. But modern pentathlon was invented by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Games. And it is supported by Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., son of a former I.O.C. president and a member of its executive board. 

Sources say that it was a very close vote between wrestling and modern pentathlon may be one or two votes separating them.  In its race with the modern pentathlon which combines fencing, horse-riding, swimming, running and shooting the five skills required of a 19^th century cavalry officer. The sport’s governing body has been lobbying hard to protect its Olympic status and the efforts apparently paid off and told that it was a process of renewing and renovating the program for the Olympics.