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ORIGINAL STORY with photos - blog by Christine Brennan, USA TODAY Sports
Wrestling's back. It was never really gone, but it's certainly back for keeps now. Voted out of the Olympics in February, the sport missed nothing: no Olympic Games, not even any free food in the International Olympic Committee hospitality suite. The IOC was supposed to add a new sport for the 2020 Olympics. Instead, it made sure one of its oldest didn't leave.
But poor softball. When wrestling became one of its competitors for that one spot back in February, its chances effectively were over. It was originally exiled from the Olympics in 2005, by mistake. The IOC thought it was dumping steroid-laden baseball, but voted out softball too – at a time it was specifically trying to increase the number of women in the Summer Games.
That's those old European aristocrats for you: Baseball? Softball? They all look the same.
Wrestling wins: Sport easily outdistances baseball/softball, squash
Over the past eight years, softball gave it the good old college try and even paired with baseball to try to impress the IOC, which turned out to be a disaster, but in the end, nothing really mattered when wrestling suddenly became its chief competitor. That turn of events prevented many countries from lobbying on behalf of softball, because they had a vested interest in wrestling too. The United States comes immediately to mind. This despite the fact that the IOC is still trying to reach an equal balance between male and female participants in the Summer Olympics, and it's not there yet. (It's 56% male, 44% female.)
Losing softball hurt then, and it hurts now -- shutting down the burgeoning development of the game among girls and women in many new places around the globe -- but IOC President Jacques Rogge did nothing to correct the mistake. An innovator would have. He leaves the IOC presidency with this as a stain on his legacy.
But the sport of softball didn't help itself either. Desperate to get back into the Games, it joined forces with baseball in April 2011. Don Porter, who has run the international softball federation for decades, was told by worldwide sports leaders that combining with baseball was the right move. But it took away his bargaining chip as a women-only sport, and when no Major League Baseball representatives came to the IOC meetings, the bid was doomed.
"In Europe people look at it as one sport, associate the drug problems and the fact that the best athletes in the sport (MLB players) don't compete," IOC member Anita DeFrantz told USA TODAY Sports' Kelly Whiteside. "By joining baseball, the leadership failed to do the right thing."
No man on earth cares more about softball than Porter does, but, in the end, it was one final loss. The sport can try again, but for now, it has struck out.
There's significant irony in wrestling beating softball (and baseball) for this "new" sport opening. One of the reasons the IOC wanted to add another sport was to make the Olympics more interesting to the vast young demographic that finds sports like wrestling to be, well, unwatchable. Here's the thing: Softball is a popular TV sport, at least in the United States, which is why it's on ESPN so often. Its ratings are quite good, better than most Olympic sports' ratings outside of the Games themselves. Perhaps Tokyo 2020 organizers will realize the error of the IOC's ways and figure out a way to bring back a sport Japan loves too.
Wrestling, meanwhile, deserves great credit for giving itself a makeover in little more than half a year. It was voted out of the Olympics in February when the IOC executive board was swayed by a popular member to not kill modern pentathlon instead, then went through seven months of purgatory where it changed leadership, became more viewer friendly and added more female athletes (although nowhere near equal with the men), and was voted back in Sunday by the full IOC membership.
I know what you're thinking. This is how the IOC works?
Yes. This is exactly how the IOC works.
As the saying goes, the last amateurs left in Olympic sports are the people running them.
