Wrestling Dropped from “Olympics”

I spent most of Saturday in a high school gym taking in an end-of-season JV county wrestling tournament, and I wondered if there will be such a tournament in twenty years. Dozens of colleges have dropped wrestling programs, and though only a fraction of the couple hundred boys I watched would be expected to go on to compete with a college team, even if all the programs from twenty years ago still existed, cutting down the prospects for the best has a way of percolating down to diminish the possibilities for everyone.

This morning we learn that wrestling will no longer be an Olympic sport, which is a bit dumbfounding. Can you really borrow the word “Olympic” for a sports festival and not have wrestling? According to IOC spokesman Mark Adams , “It’s not a case of what’s wrong with wrestling, it is what’s right with the 25 core sports.” Those other 25 sports are: aquatics (diving, swimming, synchronized swimming, water polo), archery, athletics (AKA track and field), badminton, basketball, boxing, canoeing, cycling (BMX, mountain, road, track), equestrian (dressage, eventing, jumping), fencing, field hockey, football (AKA soccer), gymnastics (artistic, rhythmic, trampoline), handball, judo, modern pentathalon, rowing, sailing, shooting, table tennis, taekwondo, tennis, triathlon, volleyball (normal and bikini), and weightlifting.

As my day around the wrestling mats wound down, it was striking how well represented in the bouts the various races of our county were. Many boys with Hispanic and Middle Eastern names placed, particularly in the lighter weight classes, and there were many Asians in the middle weights, plus conventional white and black boys at all weights. The 2012 London Games also drew in a diverse group of competitors. Gold medalists came from eight nations: Russia, Japan, Iran, Azerbaijan, USA, Cuba, Uzbekistan, and Korea. There were eleven others that didn’t get gold but did send silver medalists: Georgia, Armenia, Canada, Hungary, India, Bulgaria, China, Egypt Estonia, Puerto Rico, and Ukraine. The ten nations that sent bronze medalists but not gold or silver were Kazakhstan, Sweden, Colombia, Spain, France, Lithuania, Mongolia, Poland, North Korea, and Turkey. In the case of India, its silver and bronze medalists were two out of the six Indians receiving medals at the 2012 London Games. The Mongolian bronze medalist was one of the five from his country; the other four competed in boxing or judo.