 Mike HlasHi, I'm Gazette/TheGazette.com sports columnist Mike Hlas. This is the Hlog. We will meet here, discuss things, and then go [...] |
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Olympics: Modern pentathlon stays, wrestling goes?
IOC ditches a traditional Olympic sport for ... what?
I’ll have a column on the International Olympic Committee dropping wrestling from the Olympics later today, but here are some quick thoughts before then”
When you have been anywhere in the world and heard someone say “I am captivated by modern pentathlon,” or “My son/daughter has a dream to be a modern pentathlon champion,” or “I wish our high school offered modern pentathlon?”
OK, this is a provinicial point of view. I’m in Iowa, where amateur wrestling is more than just another sport. But it’s also been more than just another sport in the Olympics, which is on the verge of dropping wrestling from the 2020 Summer Games. Wrestling dates to the first modern Olympiad, in 1896. And the reality is, it dates way beyond that.
This stays and wrestling goes?
However, wrestling was voted out from a final group that also included modern pentathlon, taekwondo and field hockey. Reportedly, it came down to modern pentathlon and wrestling on the fourth ballot, and wrestling was the loser.
Modern pentathlon. Well, it’s a one-day Olympic event that includes five events: Pistol shooting, fencing, 200-meters freestyle swimming, show jumping, and a 3-kilometer cross-country run. You do all five, you try to rack up points. The running and shooting disciplines are contested in tandem. It’s great for training bank-robbers, I guess.
Look, here’s the deal with the International Olympic Committee. It’s no different than major-college sports. It’s all about the money. As Phil Hersh, who has covered Olympic sports for decades for the Chicago Tribune, pointed out Tuesday, taekwondo probably survived because of money. It’s an important sport in Korea, Hersh noted on Twitter, and South Korea-headquartered Samsung is one of the IOC’s big sponsors.
Wrestling’s international governing organization is FILA, which must be run by a bunch of bunglers. If you can’t spread out enough graft to keep your sport in the Olympics against the likes of modern pentathlon, which had competitors from just 26 countries in the 2012 London Olympics, you need a new governing organization.
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No wrestling in the 2020 Olympics … it’s not going to happen. When the cast of clowns on the IOC gets all the feedback from the serious olympic country committees, they will (hopefully) realize that they have screwed up big time. The long time sucess of the summer olympics is based on the tradition of sports like wrestling and track … and not some of the newer sports they have taken on.
Let’s just stop the political correctness bs and admit what the motive really is; Of the sports on the chopping block, wrestling is the way to take away the most metals from the USA. The IOC is very anti-USA. On any sports with subjective scoring the USA has to absolutely dominate or else we will lose. Remember boxing at the last Olympics. It was an absolute sham. Admittedly it wasn’t one of the best USA teams in recent memory but there were several matches that really weren’t even close but the winner was chosen out of politics. There was one of those dominant matches that even the referee initially raised the wrong hand because the loser absolutely dominated the match. So this doesn’t surprise me. Swimming and track and field may be next in favor of more bat-mitten events.