Back in the Games? How wrestling regained its Olympic appeal

But when the delegation from the International Federation of Associated Wrestling Styles (Fila) goes before the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) 125th session in Buenos Aires on Sunday, a 1,000-year relationship is on the line, BBC informed.
Those five warriors will spend 20 minutes explaining why their sport is synonymous with the Olympics, and then 10 minutes answering questions like, "How did you get in this pickle, then?"
When the three men and two women from Fila have finished, the 103 assorted royals, sporting greats and administrative elite who make up the IOC membership will pick up their voting gizmos and choose which one of baseball/softball, squash and wrestling they want to invite to their 2020 Olympics party.
IOC members are infamously difficult to read, but they like their traditions, which is why they will probably shatter the hopes of the baseball/softball and squash camps, and reprieve wrestling.
For the joint bid from baseball/softball, this will be confirmation of their 2005 rejection when they became the first sports to be chopped from the menu since polo got the mallet in 1936.
A "no" vote will hurt, but it should not come as a great surprise when you consider the fact that baseball cannot persuade Major League Baseball to down tools so the sport's best athletes can go to the Games, and the lingering suspicion that they are All-American games, not suited to a global celebration of sport.
Squash, though, will be crushed.
Now played in every corner of the world, the sport has spent the last decade trying to get past the IOC's bouncers.
Having failed to convert widespread goodwill into votes in 2005 and 2009, the World Squash Federation called in a crack squad of schmoozers for this campaign, Vero Communications, the spin doctors who got rugby sevens on the programme and sold the idea of a World Cup in the desert.
Theirs has been a concerted effort, based on strong arguments that squash is the only sport on the ballot that would be new to the Olympics, has made huge improvements as a spectacle and brings its own pop-up venue with it. Compelling stuff, but it is unlikely to be enough.
As veteran Olympic watcher Ed Hula, founder of the Around The Rings website, told me: "Wrestling can play the history card, and conservative IOC members will most likely feel it should be part of the Games."
"Wrestling will get in easily," was the blunter prediction of Duncan Mackay, the British journalist behind the insidethegames website.
The reason for his certainty can be traced back to the original decision to send wrestling to the "discontinued sport" box with croquet, lacrosse and tug of war.
Going into this February's meeting of the IOC's executive board, it looked as if it would be a straight fight between the two sports at the bottom of their league table of bums on seats, TV viewers and other measurable charms, modern pentathlon and taekwondo.
Read more