The Spirit of the Olympics

Feb 12, 2013 by Willie Saylor

Willie Saylor, Editor

This Is Real

There were message board posts and rumors floating around that wrestling was being considered to be dropped from the 2020 Olympics last weekend. Sitting in our offices at Flo Headquarters, I smirked and told Bader about it. The smirk a ‘not in a million years’ manifestation.

Silly me. I shouldn’t have underestimated the galactic stupidity of the International Olympic Committee members.

I woke up this morning to dozens of texts, emails, and voice messages expressing what exasperated wrestling fans’ sentiments after reading Associated Press reports on various sources around the globe that the IOC had voted to remove wrestling, the oldest sport known to man, and a headline event from the original, modern Olympic Games started in 1896, from the slate in 2020.

Forgive My Misanthropy, But...

My gut reaction was that it was a powerplay; that the savvy IOC that has revenue-first priorities was using this tactic to receive funds and favors from wealthy wrestling-crazed nation’s to reinstate the sport much like lobbyist in D.C. pay politicians to pass energy bills or gun laws.

The AP report rather confirmed that in a little line about the pentathlon, which was spared the chopping block where wrestling did not.

Nepotism, ethics, and payoffs, payoffs, payoffs are nothing new to the backroom dealings of IOC members who always seem to stave off any sort of sanctions under the impunity that a multi-billion dollar umbrella provides.

In a single line in the AP release, and only in a few of its iterations, it was noted that the pentathlon’s chief advocate was none other than Juan Antonio Samaranch, Jr., the son of the former IOC President who still serves as a IOC board member.

And it certainly wouldn’t be the first time Samaranch would be accused of nepotism and caving to the whims of his son’s wishes.

Like All Politics...

...it never quite makes sense. The statement made by IOC spokesman following the vote to chop wrestling stated, "In the view of the executive board, this was the best program for the Olympic Games in 2020. It's not a case of what's wrong with wrestling, it is what's right with the 25 core sports."

But that doesn’t quite jibe.

The report went on to say, ‘The board voted after reviewing a report by the IOC program commission report that analyzed 39 criteria, including television ratings, ticket sales, anti-doping policy and global participation and popularity. 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.’

Ah. That’s more like it. Yep. The IOC way of subjectivity, vagueness and opacity.

Furthermore, globally, wrestling is rather popular on the Olympic stage. European and Asian countries are wild about it, and the venue for the 2016 Olympics, Rio De Janeiro, is an MMA/Jiu Jitsu mecca that would embrace the sport.

Wrestling vs. ‘Other’ Olympic Sports

Watching some of the other sports in last summer’s London Olympics made me curl my brow at times. Trampoline? Equestrian? Handball? BMX? For real.

It prompted me to tweet ridiculous nominations for future Olympic sports. How about hula hoop, or hop scotch? How about competitive whistling or rock-paper-scissors?

I hate to assume a nose-in-the-air superiority. But, well, wrestling’s clearly better, more authentic, more in the vein of the Olympic tradition than many sports that are presently included on the Olympic docket.

The IOC is rather secretive about it’s revenue, not reporting hard dollar amounts earned and distributed at the Games. The only number it provided was 10.99 million tickets sold, and 300,000 unsold tickets (200,000 of which were the opening rounds of soccer. So even if it boils down to the old dollars and cents issue, are you going to tell me that television and sponsorship revenue was higher for fencing in 2012, than it was for wrestling? Will that attract more money than wrestling in Brazil?

This side of soccer, few sports, if any, have had the broad global impact and fan consensus as wrestling has. Dismissing wrestling is a dereliction of duties by the IOC. The mission of the Olympics is to bring together the world in a celebration of sport. That quality will be reduced without wrestling, which truly has global mass appeal and comraderie and has proven to transcend political and ethnic barriers.

Wrestling Values vs. The Modern Olympic Ethos

Wrestling still is what it is without the Olympics. The purest sport. The purest one-on-one competition and the sincerest form of self discipline and value building in athletics.

Olympic Wrestling, from one standpoint, is nothing more than a quadrennial World Championships; we have Worlds every year. Every fourth year, it’s called the Olympics. In that way, the quest for World supremacy will always remain. But the Olympics are the Olympic, and it’s a real blow to the sports image and visibility not to be perceived as one of the premier and dramatic sports.

Whether or not the concept to remove wrestling from the olympics is a political and/or a financial ploy, the mere intimation of it confirms what critics have been saying for years: the spirit of the Olympics has lost its way.

The ‘spirit’ of the Olympics, what made it compelling, was the pure acts of athletic accomplishment and the desire and dedication it took to get there. And no single athlete’s path to what is considered the ultimate prize more embodies that than the wrestler’s.

Unfortunately, what the Olympics has become is a revenue-driven corporate sideshow with a spirit of a different ilk; the ghost of what it was when it was pure.