MOSCOW: The ancient sport of wrestling yesterday agreed a wholesale shake-up of its rules to make the sport more attractive for spectators, in a desperate last throw of the dice to stave off the threat of being axed from the Olympics in 2020.
The decision of the International Olympic Committee’s executive committee in February to drop wrestling from the 2020 Games devastated the global wrestling community that unites nations from the US to Iran and raised fears of the gradual death of a sport whose origins go back to the ancient Greeks and Persians.
But wrestling has a stay of execution and a final chance. The IOC executive board is set to meet in St Petersburg on May 29 to recommend sports for the 2020 edition to the IOC session, which makes the final decision in Buenos Aires in September.
“Now is the time to move. We cannot move forward without this plan. Let us start again and keep the dream alive,” said International Federation of Associated Wrestling Styles (FILA) president Nenad Lalovic.
“Like an encounter on the mat, we are going to take advantage of this chance to score,” he added.
The FILA congress met in an extraordinary session in Moscow to agree the changes, with delegates saying their sport had overslept new shifts in global sports and that wrestling risked looking boring and incomprehensible to outsiders.
In a sign of the urgency as the clock ticks down like in the dying seconds of a gold-medal match, the new rules agreed by the FILA bureau will be officially implemented on May 19, just one day after the congress meeting. The rule changes to both the Olympic wrestling styles -- Greco Roman and Freestyle -- aim to make the sport more attractive. AFP
