When wrestling was dropped from the 2020 Olympic program in February 2013, the shock was as if wrestling itself had been scuttled. After all, if a sport which had participated in the birth of both the classical and modern Olympics could get the chop, was anything else safe?
A Herculean sigh of relief was breathed when this core of core-Olympic sports was reinstated by year’s end, but many were left wondering about the IOC’s motives.
Was it just a move to bring a wayward organisation to heel? For years wrestling’s governing body had resisted appointing athletes to its decision-making bodies, medicos to its technical board, and any suggestion of a women’s commission.
Some would allege it was due to wrestling’s poor Olympic ratings, but by most measures it was far from the worst performer. In London, its IOC webpage viewings rated above tennis, not far behind volleyball and soccer, and received three times boxing’s hits.
Or was the whole exercise simply a shot across the bow of all Olympic sports, to keep them on their toes?
Yet in all this, it should be remembered that the modern Olympic movement has never held itself up as a kind of roving pop-up museum of ancient arts. Even historically, recent sports like rugby and golf had premiered by the third Olympics in 1904, though these were soon to be mothballed for a century or so. One Olympiad before, in 1900, ballooning and motorsports had also been given a run. The movement itself could have been awarded a gold medal for paradigm pushing when it briefly admitted music, painting, sculpture and architecture to the fold in 1912 (there has never been subsequent talk – or even song – of readmitting these).
And at those very same games, if evidence were needed that the IOC had at least a grudging loyalty to its roots, it was when a wrestling semi-final between a Finn and Russian took almost 12 hours to complete. Was it the bitter aftertaste of this marathon of mutual-man-mangling that the IOC was trying to avenge when it made its shock announcement just over a century later?
When it comes to spectator appeal, my own Olympic sport, swimming, often comes in for a pasting. Posters in these pages have been known to label it boring, though the tone between correspondents seems more playful than accusing.
So I was pleasantly surprised recently to find that the aquatic section of the Olympic program often comes out on top in the IOC’s website popularity stakes.
Still, mindful of the evidently precarious status of all five-ring sports, I wondered if swimming shouldn’t be pushing for innovation while still ahead. And in recent years it seems to have begun doing just that, even featuring mixed-gender relays in its FINA World Cup series.
But do we really need more relays? To me, swimming relays make as much sense as javelin or pole-vault relays: less actually, because those would make unmissable viewing. Relays also massively favour those nations with deep enough pockets to cultivate depth, and tend to muddy the relative merits of individual achievement (it wasn’t the fault of Shane Gould, Dawn Fraser or Murray Rose that they won the same number of individual golds as Ian Thorpe, yet lacked the funded teammates to make up relays).
If I were in the unenviable position of keeping swimming ahead of the game of Olympic legitimacy (let alone guess how the game works), I would start by allowing individual medley competitors to order their strokes as they wish. The current fixed order is butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle.
Picture swimmers coming down the final lap in up to four different strokes, at different speeds: a freestyler hammering down on a breaststroker, for instance, in the last few metres for the gold. No one could accuse such finishes of being predictable.
Of course, a little thought could tell you that several variations would automatically exclude themselves from this DIY medley model, but that can wait for a committee.
Next, I would allow 1500-metre freestylers to change lanes, as long as they are back in their starting lane by the vinegar lap. They could change any number of times they like, even completing a grand tour from one side of the pool to the other and back, if they thought this strategically effective or entertaining. And it goes without saying that they mustn’t enter a lane already doubly occupied.
This whole business would, of course, require swimmers to circle their lanes, as in training, so as to admit incoming swimmers without collision or fraying of tempers. It would also necessitate skills like being able to seamlessly tumble in one lane and emerge next door. Swimmers can actually already do this.
Of course, the complexity of rules to facilitate all this fraternising would be of Byzantine dimensions, but no one would be left saying the race was boring, should populism be the new Olympic by-word.
The last change I would make, and I have given this no less thought than the preceding ones, would be to offer up one stroke for the chopping block as a preemptive sacrifice, to resonate with ancient traditions. And this would be one monstrous favour in the Olympic bank, if that is to count for anything.
That stroke would of course be butterfly, being by far the latest interloper to the swimming family, having been invented by competitors trying to cheat at breaststroke. They all knew what breaststroke was supposed to look like (the rule book actually dated back to Shakespeare’s time), but the lawyers in the locker rooms kept seeing loopholes, which they eventually stretched into today’s butterfly.
And that’s where I would leave it, having here attempted to put a little back into the sport I took from, as we ex’s are required to do – if not by law, but perhaps lore.
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