Greg Strobel welcomed the news that wrestling
Wednesday's International Olympic Committee executive committee cut-down vote Wednesday with one word:
"Yee-hah!"
The reaction of the former
wrestling coach and current USA Wrestling second vice president matched the moment as wrestling, along with baseball/softball and squash, kept its chances to be a 'core' Olympic sport alive.
If wrestling had lost the vote, it would have had no chance to be in the 2020 Olympics and might never have gotten back again.
"I was somewhat surprised," Strobel said. "Going into the vote, I thought we had a 50/50 chance. This was the first big hurdle."
But as USA Wrestling communications director Gary Abbott said Thursday, "We have a lot more work to do."
The world wrestling community came together, made changes to the sport and to its leadership, and convinced a committee it deserved a spot in the Olympic Games.
Now it must rally again to convince the full IOC assembly, which will vote Sept. 8 in Buenos Aires.
Strobel exudes confidence.
"This was the big hurdle," he said. "On this committee there weren't many representatives from wrestling countries. In the full IOC assembly there are a lot more wrestling countries. I think we have an 80-20 chance there."
Abbott is more cautious.
"We're not going to take anything for granted," he said. "We're going to fight like we're the underdogs."
On the face of it wrestling should have the edge over its competitors. Baseball/softball have limited geographic appeal, and squash battles obscurity and a somewhat unfair tag of elitism. Wrestling is comparatively ubiquitous geographically and has a history in the sport that cannot be matched.
"We were in the very first Olympics in ancient times, we were in the first modern Olympics (in 1896) and we've been in all the Olympics but one (1900) since," Abbott said. "Everyone knows the story of wrestling. Now we have to convince people it belongs in the future."
The changes wrestling made since its Olympic status came under threat have been made with increasing its appeal with the future in mind. The sport dumped the ineffective leader of FILA, its international governing body. It increased women's opportunities across the board. It made its freestyle rules simpler for fans to understand (even hardcore mat heads, much less the broader public, could struggle with Olympic rules) and better for the wrestlers as well.
"Now you have to score points to win," Strobel said. "Before you could take no risk and have a 50/50 shot. Now there's a reason to score a lot of points."
More points means, everyone involved in wrestling hopes, more excitement and more fans.
This is the general point that Easton and East Stroudsburg legend Jack Cuvo has been trying to make for years: add excitement to the sport.
More fans and new fans would really. As a longtime District 11 official said a couple of months ago, "Everybody likes football and everybody likes basketball but only wrestling people like wrestling."
Wrestling people really like wrestling, but that kind of single-minded passion can induce myopia and a certain overestimation about the sport's place in the world. It may have been that attitude displayed on a larger stage that caused the passivity and overconfidence that led to the first vote to exclude wrestling.
That's precisely what Abbott and USA Wrestling want to avoid going forward.
"John Bardis (a former Olympic Greco-Roman Team Leader and a member of the Committee to Preserve Olympic Wrestling) said that every person involved in wrestling needs to have their fingerprints on this decision," Abbott said. "We need to keep the buzz going. We need to give the IOC a vision of the future of wrestling."
Strobel said he thought the international cooperation of the U.S., Russia and Iran helped the cause, as did the advocacy of powerful people such as Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But you don't have to be a world power to help. Abbott said there's a role for everyone.
"The general public doesn't have a vote, but there are many things they can do to keep this a hot topic," he said. "Go watch our webcasts like the women's international matches (Battle of the Falls) Friday; show up for our events, follow us on Facebook, continue to be active. People can donate to our efforts. We raised over $1 million for this effort, we may need $2 million for the (September) vote. People can go online and vote for wrestling in world-wide polls about which sport to keep. (In a recent poll) we got 135,000 people to vote for us and we won. These are the ways people in the Lehigh Valley can help us."
Stan Dziedzic, an Allen graduate and past president of USA Wrestling, told a press conference that wrestling had won a semifinal, but just a semifinal, and faced a more intense match ahead.
It's one that every supporter of the sport anywhere in the world is hoping results in a pin for wrestling.