The International Olympic Committee (IOC) dropped wrestling from the Olympic program yesterday, a surprise decision that deprives Turkey from its stronghold in the Olympic Games, Hurriyet Daily News reports.
The IOC executive board decided to retain modern pentathlon, the event considered most at risk and instead remove wrestling from its list of 25 “core sports” in a move that removes one of the oldest Olympic sports from the 2020 Games.
The IOC board acted after reviewing the 26 sports on the current Olympic program. Eliminating one sport allows the International Olympic Committee to add a new sport to the program later this year. Wrestling, which combines freestyle and Greco-Roman events, goes back to the inaugural modern Olympics in Athens in 1896.
“It’s a real shock. Wrestling was not on the radar,” an IOC source told Agence France-Presse. “It was a very close vote between wrestling and modern pentathlon, maybe one or two votes separating them. The trouble was while modern pentathlon and taekwondo did effective lobbying; wrestling thought they were safe and did none at all.”
The decision means Turkey will have to cope with the absence of wrestling, its most successful sport, in the 2020 Games.
