IT WAS recently announced that wrestling will be put in a vote-off category with 20 other Olympic sports to be axed from the Olympics, as of 2020.
With this announcement, however, there was no reason or explanation as to why it could be banished.
It has had no problems and there were no signs showing that wrestling could be axed, it has totally come from out of the blue.
As a wrestling mark (fan) myself, I was furious about this decision. It left me wondering if it is what the people want in the Olympics or what is good for business.
Wrestling, as an Olympic sport, doesn't bring as much money as other sports, eg running, cycling and swimming, do.
The reason it is being pushed away could be: they are losing money from it and not enough people are watching it as they would have liked.
For me, this only means one thing: advertise it and sell it to the audience more. Olympic wrestling lacks advertisement so people aren't interested.
Professional wrestling companies have, whilst trying to get it better known and make it more entertaining, brought a bad reputation to the sport.
Professional wrestling is staged and is made for entertainment to show what an amazing sport it is.
This has had an adverse effect, though. It has made people brand wrestling with names like "staged", "fake" etc, and these names are really hard to shrug off once they're there.
After watching professional wrestling, some people then go on to think that all wrestling is boring and the reason it is staged is to try to hide the fact it isn't entertaining when, actually, it is there to highlight how entertaining it is.
There are plenty of wrestlers all over the planet as wrestling is always being competed in.
There are sports that are lacking athletes and need competitors, so surely these are the sports that need to be gone because people obviously don't enjoy competing in them?
Some would say that taking wrestling out of the Olympics is similar to taking the running events out of the Olympics as they are all original sports.
If a running event was taken from the Olympics there would be uproar because running is renowned as the main Olympic sport.
Wrestling is also a main Olympic sport, but it doesn't seem to have the same cult even though it should.
Some of the people I look up to aspire to wrestle in the Olympics, so without the event, this could mean that the number of young wrestlers (that are, effectively, role models for children) could decrease.
Every event in the previous Olympics was aired on television. This leads me to think that the decision was possibly made in regards to the viewing figures of each event.
Wrestling obviously didn't have as many viewing figures and this then put them into a category of sports not being watched.
The ridiculous thing is that wrestling could have been on at the same time as swimming, cycling or running (the sports that are constantly advertised and have lots of funding), so people tune into these events instead because these are the sports billed as the "main" ones.
Why should the number of people watching a sport for a couple of Olympics affect its massive tradition and history?
There are some countries that have millions of wrestlers and it is even seen as a primary sport in some places.
This means that these countries are going to be like fish out of water when wrestling is taken from the Olympics. It's going from being the most important sport in their life to a non-existent Olympic sport.
I understand that wrestling isn't everybody's "cup of tea", however, if sports like wrestling keep getting axed from the Olympics, surely it is going to eventually lead to sports like gymnastics, running, cycling and diving getting axed?
We need to take a stand and back our traditional sports before the Olympics loses its glory altogether!
