Political factors should not come into play when excluding sports

Preechachan Wiriyanupappong

Newpreechachan

@hotmail.com February 17, 2013 1:00 am

The International Olympic Committee last Tuesday proposed eliminating wrestling from the Olympic programme in 2020 - to howls of protests all over the world.

The final decision to exclude wrestling, one of the founding sports of the ancient and modern Olympic Games, was made during the IOC's 15-member executive meeting in Lausanne, based on, it said, an analysis of the sport's attractiveness to youth, ticket sales and the number of participants.

Learning about the axing of the combat sport, several leaders and athletes from around the world, including Cuba, which won many gold medals in its Olympic history, reacted with anger and criticism. However, the IOC and its president Jacques Rogge, in particular, responded calmly to the protests.

Earlier, badminton and taekwondo, in which Thailand has Olympic medal hopes, were facing close scrutiny when the IOC board was considering which of the current 26 Summer Olympic sports have to be removed from the 2020 programme. Taking out one sport would make way for a new one to be added to the programme later this year.

A few days prior to the IOC's decision, taekwondo, the Korean martial art that has been in the Olympics since 2000 in Sydney, was mentioned as being among the sports in danger of getting shunted out. In the London Games last year, the sport faced judging controversies and the gold medals were spread among different Asian nations.

Badminton was also in danger of getting voted out of the 2020 Olympics due to the scandal involving eight female players from South Korea, China and Indonesia trying to lose matches in group stages and facing easier opponents in knockout matches during the London Olympics. However, my feeling is that badminton, modern pentathlon and taekwondo officials, who realised they were facing problems in retaining their places, lobbied hard with the board members and got the sports retained.

If the IOC had excluded badminton and taekwondo, Thailand would have been one of the affected parties and its chances of winning Olympic medals would be fairly slim.

Since featherweight Somluck Kamsing won the country its first Olympic gold medal in 1996 in Atlanta, Thailand's successes in Olympics have come from amateur boxing, taekwondo, weightlifting and badminton. If taekwondo and badminton were dropped, that would have sounded the death-knell of the two sports in the country and many would have abandoned it totally for an Olympic sport.

The furore surrounding wrestling's predicament is in stark contrast to the rather muted reaction to the voting off of baseball and softball in 2009, probably because they ended up being replaced by the commercially attractive golf and rugby sevens for the 2016 edition in Rio de Janeiro.

To exclude some sports from major sporting events such as Olympics, Asian Games and the Southeast Asian Games, the host country should think deeply and give a plausible explanation rather than leave it to the whim of a few officials with possible vested interests.

The IOC, for its part, says that it analyses more than three dozen criteria including television ratings, ticket sales, anti-doping policy and global participation and popularity before recommending the exclusion of a particular sport. My hunch is that the decisions at the IOC are influenced by political, emotional and sentimental factors.

In the SEA Games, the host nation always excludes sports dominated by rivals and instead adds its own traditional competitions and non-Olympic sports. It has become a cruel joke played on opponents and reduced to a game of one-upmanship.

Myanmar will host the 27th SEA Games this December in Nay Pyi Taw. To the surprise of all, it decided to remove Olympic events such as beach volleyball, gymnastics and tennis. Its decision apparently is not in line with that of the IOC, but done to raise its chances of winning more gold and emerging as overall champions. Myanmar must realise hosting the Games should not be done with the intent of winning the maximum number of medals, but to spread Olympic principles throughout the region. But who cares about Pierre de Coubertin's principles these days?

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