As long as this stays in the Olympics, MK will be pleased
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=fruimvo90vA
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As long as this stays in the Olympics, MK will be pleased
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=fruimvo90vA
Lol!!!!!!!!!!
But she is kind of wannabe rock-a-billy. No comment on the skank part. ;)
As amusing as this roller derby tangent has become, for the record, Olympic roller sports also include inline speed skating and roller figure skating. I'm not exactly sure which events are up for the bid. In the same vein, the International Wushu Federation governs both taolu and sanda, but only taolu is part of the Olympic bid, and only solo taolu, limited to a few specific forms.
If the olympics wants to make cuts, well, there's a huge issue with medal count. Every country wants to insert events where they will get more medals. We saw special stipulations with Korea and TKD. Some sports, like the races (swimming and track) seem to me to dole out a ton of medals for each division. I feel some of that could be shaved off, and we could keep wrasslin.
Go Slovenia!
Follow the link for the vid. Not sure which TCKFMC year this was exactly, but here's the 2013 TCEC thread.
Good to see that Tiger Claw logo so large. :cool:
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Wushu: A new sport for the Olympics?
February 17, 2013 5:00 PM
As wrestling is getting pushed out of the Olympic Games, a new martial art may take its place. Terrel Brown reports.
Really? Wrestling?! One of the defining sports in the Olympic revival and it is not being renewed. Hm.
Okay, so I've never watched Olymic events and have no interest but it still seems shameful.
Wushu, I suppose has as much right to international notice as Tae Kwon Do ...but it's embarrassing for "real" martial artists.
...and Wrestling might be back in.
Quote:
Wrestling, baseball-softball could return for 2020 Olympics
Associated Press
Posted: 05/29/2013 08:43:17 AM PDT
Updated: 05/29/2013 08:56:09 AM PDT
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- Wrestling, squash and baseball-softball made the IOC short list Wednesday for inclusion in the 2020 Olympics.
Three months after being dropped from the 2020 program, wrestling took a big step toward keeping its Olympic status.
Eight sports were vying for a single opening in the lineup.
Eliminated from contention were five sports -- karate, roller sports, sport climbing, wakeboarding and the Chinese martial art of wushu.
The IOC executive board will submit wrestling, squash and baseball-softball to the full IOC assembly for a final decision on Sept. 8 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
"It's a good mix of team sports and individual," IOC vice president Thomas Bach said.
The decision came after the eight sports federations made closed-door presentations to the IOC executive board.
Men's baseball and women's softball, which have been off the program since the 2008 Beijing Games, merged into a single federation to improve their chances.
Squash is bidding for an Olympic spot for a third time.
Wrestling, with a tradition dating to the ancient Olympics, was surprisingly cut from the list of core sports by the IOC board in February. The decision caused an international outcry and prompted the United States, Russia, Iran and other countries to join forces in a bid to bring the sport back.
ah, but the USAWKF and others will still tell people wushu and sanshou are in the Olympics :rolleyes:
So they are making some major changes these days. Anyone happy with them?
Wrestling out(not final) and pole dancing in(not final). WTF???
I'm curious as to what John Wang thinks about that trade since he's personally invested in both.
For me, it's no contest. I have no issue with pole dancing, but taking away wrestling is absolutely ridiculous. I have yet to hear one person say they are glad wrestling is out. At best, they don't really care either way. Hopefully enough people will come out and support the sport when they have their lil panel in september.
Does anyone else think that the olympics are compromising too much these days? What's next to go? Sprinting? Crazy. If you want to add current fads to the games, trade them for older fads that have lost favor, but not at the expense of the sports that the whole idea was founded upon.
Or they can just expand, but then that messes with the bottom line, and we all know that's the true goal here. So sad what it's become.
Yeah, eliminating wrestling from the Olympics is plain stupid. Wasn't it one of the very first Olympic sports?
I stopped caring about the Olympics. They are too politicized.
Not worth being involved in from my standpoint until they change out the entire board of the IOC who have drifted so far from the original vision, it's just a money sack getting pilfered at the expense and to the detriment of a lot of athletes.
Usually I watch, if it's convenient, wrestling and judo as a VERY distant second. And I'll watch random stuff cause it's on. Maybe I'll watch the daily highlights on the evening news. If they take away wrestling, I won't have anything to watch.
As a kid, not understanding the politics, I loved the olympics. So now it just bums me out.
Oh, I watch gymnastics too. I know that isn't going anywhere, but it has some dumb fad elements too.
If there's one lesson we have learned from Wushu's Olympic bid, it's that most of the news on what's in and what's out is BS. Pole sports jsut benefited from some viral rumor spreading in the wake of their 1st World Championship. Yes, they submitted a petition to the IOC, but anyone can do that. Pole Sports isn't even an IOC International Federation yet, so they have a long way to go before even getting considered as an event.
That being said, I'd totally watch Olympic pole sports. :D
Quote:
Believe It Or Not, Future Olympic Games Could Actually Feature Pole Dancing As Newest Sport
August 12, 2013 11:08 pm EDT by Marilee Gallagher
If you were to ask the International Pole Sports Federation (IPSF) if pole dancing, something most of us know as an activity done in the strip club, should be considered a sport and worthy of consideration in the Olympics, then the answer you would get is a simple yes.
And not only does the IPSF (which I bet most have never even heard of) think pole dancing, now renamed pole sports, is worthy of inclusion, they are actually pushing for it.
According to several sources the IPSF, which held the first world championship in 2012, has been doing a lot in the recent months to improve its image and change the nature of how everyday people look at pole dancing. In fact, to eliminate some of that burlesque feeling type of stigma, the IPSF has even changed the name from pole dancing to pole sports.
As part of their effort to include pole sports in the Olympics, the IPSF has made changes to their rulebook. These are not limited to a professional sporting dress code, the renaming of some of the classic yet suggestive moves and a ban of props such as top hats and canes. Dancing in an overly erotic manner, as well as removing any articles of clothing, is also expressly forbidden.
Doesn’t quite sound like what you and I might believe pole dancing to be, but that is exactly the point. Because while hearing that pole dancing might be in the Olympics is something that is laughable and almost impossible to believe, the IPSF is taking its reformation project very seriously.
They want that bid and considering that things such as synchronized swimming, rhythmic gymnastics and ice dancing get to exist in the greatest collection of sporting events in the world, it is not unreasonable to think we might one day be watching pole dancing in the Olympic Games with a cleaned-up image.
Because after all, while it may not qualify as a sport, no one can deny the athleticism needed to pole dance.
So get your ones ready, because pole dancing pole sports might be headed toward Olympic glory.
How about removing table tennis, or diving. Who even likes to sit there and watch that? Ping pong is fun to play, not so much to watch on tv.
Baseball? Softball? You traitor.
What about Wushu? WHAT ABOUT POLE SPORTS!
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Jackie Chan supports baseball, softball to return to Olympics in 2020
Nick Zaccardi
Aug 14, 2013, 2:40 PM EDT
Baseball and softball have been fighting together to get back into the Olympics, and now they’re getting some help from one of Hollywood’s great fighters.
Jackie Chan was named a Playball2020 ambassador for the World Baseball Softball Confederation on Tuesday, less than a month before baseball-softball faces an International Olympic Committee vote as to whether it returns for the 2020 Olympic Games.
“I have noticed that baseball and also softball have been growing globally and attracting boys and girls to come together to play [a sport],” Chan said in a press release. “The two sports teach children teamwork, discipline — about facing challenges and overcoming difficulties.
“Hence, I support baseball and softball’s inclusion in the 2020 Olympic Games and I sincerely wish baseball and softball receive the favorable votes from the IOC members.”
Baseball-softball, wrestling and squash are the three finalists for one spot in the 2020 Olympic program. The IOC will choose one of the three on Sept. 8 in Buenos Aires. Baseball became a regular Olympic sport beginning in 1992, and softball in 1996. The last Olympics for both sports was 2008.
Chan, originally from Hong Kong, has Olympic history. He carried the torch before the 2004 Athens Olympics and sang at the Beijing Olympics opening and closing ceremonies in 2008.
Now I understand what happened with Wrestling.
continued next postQuote:
Olympic Wheel of Fortune
An Al-Ahram International squash championship in Egypt. Squash may have the most to gain from the Olympics, but its bid is now seen as a long shot.
By DAVID SEGAL
Published: August 31, 2013
ONE of the year’s most heated competitions in all of sports will take place in a Hilton hotel conference room in Buenos Aires. But unless any of the participants get a case of the jitters, you won’t see a lot of sweat. You won’t see many athletes, either, or any courts, nets, uniforms or scoreboards.
Instead, on Sunday, Sept. 8, you’ll see the leaders of three sports federations — wrestling, squash and baseball-softball, which combined last year — presenting finely honed sales pitches to the 104 members of the International Olympic Committee. After each 20-minute spiel, there will be 10 minutes of questions and answers. At some point, the committee members will test their electronic voting equipment with an irrelevant warm-up question. (The group was once asked to choose a favorite of three oceans; the Atlantic won.) Then the members will decide a matter of genuine import: Which of these sports will join the Olympic Games in 2020?
It will be the culmination of a contest that began two years ago and has cost the finalists millions of dollars. But for the winner, the prize is so big that it’s hard to value. Actually, part of it can be valued. Every sport gets a cut of the money generated by the Games’ broadcast and revenue deals, with each share determined by the sport’s popularity, measured by the number of spectators, television viewers and other factors. The pot to be divvied up for sports in the London Games last year is $520 million.
More important, the sport gets the global exposure of billions of television and online viewers and a place in the sports pantheon in which countries worldwide invest, simply because the sport is part of the Olympics. Suddenly, there are youth leagues and commercial endorsements. Medals are at stake, and with them a chance to burnish national self-image.
“The U.S. is a special case because, unlike most countries, it doesn’t have a direct federal government program for sports,” says Michael Payne, the I.O.C.’s former marketing director. “But look at Turkey. It’s currently spending $500 million a year on sports development, and all of that money goes to Olympics-related sports. You’re either at the table or you’re not.”
In the United States, the imprimatur of the Games means universities pay attention. A few years ago, it was hard to find a college team in women’s beach volleyball. The sport is now an Olympics favorite, and there are about 34 college teams, says Doug Beal, the chief executive of USA Volleyball.
“It’s impossible to overstate how significant it is to be included in the Olympics,” Mr. Beal says. “Participation has increased by a factor of 100 or 200. We’ve got high-performance camps, a national junior tour. The Olympics drives kids’ interest. They see it on TV, they identify with the medal winners and they want to play that game.”
This is squash’s third attempt to enter the Olympics, which has capped the total number of sports at 28, and it is the only sport among the finalists that has never been in the Games.
For squash’s ardent fan base, this is more than a little confounding. Every four years, when synchronized swimming scissor-kicks its way onto the world stage, squash aficionados ask: If that sport is in the disco, how long will squash be stuck behind the velvet rope?
Not much longer, if Mike Lee has his way. He is chairman of Vero Communications, a sports lobbying consulting firm that is part of a small but growing industry for campaigns like this. Mr. Lee, a onetime political consultant who is based in London, was hired by the World Squash Federation to oversee its Olympic bid. Among Vero’s recent achievements is guiding rugby sevens into the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Squash was one of the sports that rugby sevens bested.
Working in politics and Olympic sports is not that different, Mr. Lee said. Both need compelling narratives and both need to cater to voters. The squash narrative, as framed by Vero, is all about the game’s global reach, its embrace of innovation and its easy integration into the Games — the event would involve just 64 players from around the world, 32 men and 32 women, in a glass court that could be built anywhere.
“In the final stage of this, we’re also giving a push to the very salient and important point that squash is the only truly new sport in terms of the Olympic program,” Mr. Lee said. “That will feature significantly in our final presentation in Buenos Aires.”
What exactly is the Olympics looking for? The I.O.C. has a dauntingly long list of 39 criteria. The sport should offer gender equity (medals to men and women in roughly equal numbers), excellence around the world (as opposed to a few countries) and popularity among fans and sponsors. Ease of broadcasting the sport is another factor, along with the cost of building a place for competition. There is also the vague but all-important “value added,” defined as “value added by the sport to the Olympic Games; value added by the Olympic Games to the sport.”
Strict rules govern how federations can woo those 104 I.O.C. members, a reaction to the bribery scandal after more than $1 million was spent on wining and dining I.O.C. officials to bring the 2002 Winter Games to Salt Lake City. No gifts. No disparaging the competition. No visiting the homes of I.O.C. members. E-mail and letters are fine. Direct contact is encouraged, so long as it’s at a place like a sporting event.
Squash would be a truly new Olympic sport, notes the consultant Mike Lee, who is overseeing the World Squash Federation bid.
The process, in short, is designed for maximum fairness. But that doesn’t mean every federation has an equal chance, at least not this time. Many Olympic watchers see wrestling as the heavy favorite, which on its face might seem strange, given that the I.O.C. executive board essentially booted the sport from the Games in February. For years, the board criticized wrestling as boring and bewildering to viewers and for failing to update its rules and presentation.
After wrestling showed up on the finalists’ list, many people concluded that the point of this multisport contest had suddenly changed. It was no longer to refresh the Games, as widely believed. It was to give wrestling — which has been linked to the Olympics going back to their birth in 776 B.C. — what a consultant called “the mother of all wake-up calls” — to stun it into modernizing.
It seems to have worked: after its ouster, wrestling immediately started a major turnaround and charm offensive, overhauling its rules. Squash, which Olympics watchers had regarded as the front-runner for more than a year, is now considered a long shot.
Then again, I.O.C. voters are hard to pin down. Some people say a surprise verdict in Buenos Aires is still possible.
“You have 104 free agents here,” said one Olympics consultant who isn’t involved with any of the sports and who requested anonymity for fear of offending decision makers. “They have been known to make multiple commitments, which they can do because the vote is secret. The level of predictability here is lower than any you’ll find in politics.”
ALL three federations have spent the last few months in a lobbying frenzy. But schmoozing every I.O.C. member is a challenge. They are spread around the globe, and no country has enough of them to form a bloc with any heft. The United States has three votes; Russia has four. There are members in Zimbabwe, Italy, New Zealand, Burundi, China and Oman.
Representatives from the federations would reveal little about strategy. Mr. Lee even declined to say who would make squash’s presentation in Buenos Aires, and Narayana Ramachandran, president of the World Squash Federation and the sport’s main Olympics ambassador, declined in early August to discuss his travel plans.
“If people read where I’m going, who I’m meeting, that would reveal strategy,” he said by phone from Chennai, India, where he lives.
Of the three sports in competition, squash has the most to gain from the Olympics. For the uninitiated, the game is played in a what is basically a large, open-air box, with two competitors hitting a ball against the front wall. You win a point if the ball bounces twice before your opponent can reach it; you lose the point if you hit the ball too low on the front wall and strike what is known as the tin, squash’s answer to the tennis net. Often called chess on legs, the sport requires endurance, strength and a lot of strategizing.
In the United States, the game is largely an East Coast phenomenon and is regarded as a game for elite prep schools, colleges and clubs. But it’s an everyman’s workout in countries like South Africa and Australia, where courts are found in places that also have bars and dart boards. There are 50,000 courts in 185 countries, according to the World Squash Federation.
The game is positively obscure compared with its competitors — and, relative to baseball, the pay stinks. The top player in squash last year, Nick Matthew of England, earned $129,592 in prize money, according to ESPN magazine. The average salary for a major-league baseball player that year was $3.2 million.
Also - see our latest cover story: Wushu Out of the Olympics…Again
Quote:
Squash would be even poorer without the energy and money of one man: Ziad al-Turki. A 48-year-old Saudi Arabian whose father runs Atco, a Saudi-based international conglomerate, Mr. al-Turki became a fan of the game as a boy, playing on a court that an uncle had built on his roof. When he was in his late 30s, Mr. al-Turki lived in Connecticut, where the teaching pro at a local club was a retired squash great named Brett Martin. That convinced him that the game was in dire need of help.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Mr. al-Turki said in a phone interview. “Nobody hit the ball like Brett Martin, and here is this guy, giving lessons for $25 an hour. We became friends, and that’s when I learned that as brilliant as the game of squash is, there was no money in it.”
In 2005, with the permission of the Professional Squash Association, the game’s pro league, Mr. al-Turki organized a tournament in Saudi Arabia with total prize money of $127,500, about double what some tournaments then offered. A group of players soon asked him to join the P.S.A. board, and he is now the organization’s chairman. He has spent a lot of time and more of his personal fortune than he would care to calculate — “I don’t want to scare myself,” he said — revamping the sport.
For a tournament in England, he oversaw the construction of a futuristic, inflatable structure that could be built around a portable court, serving as an eye-catching marquee. He also made the action easier to follow on TV and in the stands, bringing in top-of-the-line video cameras and experimenting with different tints for the court’s glass walls. (He settled on a light shade of purple.) He even changed the color of the ball, which is typically black.
“We went to Dunlop,” the sports equipment maker, “and said, ‘Everybody complains you can’t see the ball on TV,’ ” he recalled. “They made us balls in neon, pink, yellow. It turns out that what looks best is a white ball in a court with purple walls.”
These alterations have made the game more accessible and lent it a youthful cast. Which has made it more appealing to the Olympics and is a big reason that squash is in the hunt in Buenos Aires. Success there would be the greatest moment in squash’s 140-year history, and the Olympics tournament would instantly become the sport’s most prestigious event. A promotional video for the bid shows the world’s top women’s player, Nicol David of Malaysia, saying, “I would happily trade all six world titles for an Olympic gold medal.”
IF squash has the most to gain by inclusion in the Games, wrestling has the most to lose by exclusion. Several Olympics experts said exile from the Games would effectively sound a death knell for the sport, entailing not just the loss of Olympic money but also a loss, or drastic reduction, in subsidies to the 177 national wrestling federations, a vast majority of which are financed by governments.
Wrestling’s journey to the list of finalists began with an act by the I.O.C. executive board that in hindsight looks like that of a furious, passive-aggressive parent. On Feb. 12, the board announced what it called the Olympics’ 25 core sports — and wrestling wasn’t on the list.
The board had been grumbling about wrestling for years. The sport’s federation refused to evolve, and its arcane rules had left many spectators confused about the basics, like who was winning a match. Other sports have enlivened their events; weight lifting, for instance, now relies on the same sort of tension-filled music once heard during the silences on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” The emphasis is on entertainment, excitement and clarity.
Wrestling made no concessions to entertainment, and it had other problems. It awarded more medals to men than to women. It also seemed to take for granted its position in the Games. While other sports carefully filled out a long questionnaire detailing why they should continue to be part of the Olympics, wrestling did such a slapdash job that the I.O.C. sent it back for a do-over, said Anita DeFrantz, an I.O.C. member.
“They didn’t take it seriously,” she said. “One of the questions was, ‘How many continental games does your sport compete in,’ like the Pan Am Games? They put zero. Which isn’t true.”
The federation didn’t even bother to send anyone to the meeting where the I.O.C. listed the 25 core sports — and eliminated wrestling. Some of wrestling’s leaders learned about the disaster on the news.
The cavalier attitude went beyond paperwork. A certain amount of schmoozing is expected of representatives from participating sports, many of whom have set up their federations near Lausanne, Switzerland, the I.O.C.’s base. The International Federation of Associated Wrestling Styles — which somehow translates to the acronym FILA — is based about 20 miles from the I.O.C., but until recently, FILA’s leaders kept to themselves.
“I talked to a guy at the I.O.C. who said, ‘I’ve worked here for 14 years and I’ve never met one person from FILA,’ ” said Robert Condron, part of a small armada of consultants and public relations specialists brought aboard FILA after wrestling was pushed out of the Games. “The thing with the I.O.C. is recognition and trust. ‘I know you. I trust you.’ That wasn’t there.”
Four days after the Feb. 12 announcement, Raphael Martinetti, the FILA president, resigned. Wrestling organizations around the world quickly rallied behind Nenad Lalovic, a burly and charismatic Serbian, who became the acting president. He announced changes to the rules almost immediately, all intended to make matches more exciting and easier to follow. (Takedowns, for instance, would be worth two points, making them more valuable than pushing an opponent out of the ring.) The men-to-women ratio in medal opportunities would be improved by eliminating two categories in men’s competition and adding two for women.
In early March, Mr. Lalovic met with Jacques Rogge, the I.O.C. president, to tell him, in effect: message received.
“I said to him, ‘I know why we are out, and we don’t blame anybody but ourselves,’ ” Mr. Lalovic recalled, speaking by phone last week from Buenos Aires, where he had just landed. “We were not awake. We were not listening. We were hardheaded and we have to reverse that situation.”
A budget for a readmission campaign was quickly drawn up, with a ceiling of $2 million, Mr. Lalovic said. He and his staff hired TSE Consulting to develop a strategy and Teneo Holdings, based in New York, to shape wrestling’s presentations. One of the bigger outlays: FILA bankrolled the flights and hotel stays of representatives from 132 countries who traveled to Moscow in May for what was called an Extraordinary Congress, where Mr. Lalovic was formally elected. Simply sending FILA’s entourage of a dozen or so people to Buenos Aires for two weeks will cost, he estimates, more than $100,000.
“We did all that we could in such a short period,” Mr. Lalovic said. “That was our handicap. The other sports had more time to prepare.”
In fact, softball and baseball began trying to reclaim their Olympics spots almost as soon as they lost them, after Beijing in 2008. They were dropped for a variety of reasons, I.O.C. members and consultants say, including baseball’s doping problems and the dominance of a few countries. Then there is Major League Baseball’s refusal to alter its season so the best players can go to the Olympics.
This is a serious impediment because the Games want the highest standard of competition. Undeterred, the leaders of the World Baseball Softball Confederation have been fanning out around the world. In a recent visit to New York, three sat in a conference room with a reporter at a downtown law firm to explain their case. The group included a surprise: a son of Fidel Castro, Antonio, who works for the World Baseball Softball Confederation. A tan, 40-ish man in a dark suit, he looked more like an international banker than his fatigues-wearing father.
“We don’t see this as an issue at all,” Mr. Castro said when asked about baseball’s Major League problem. The reason, it seems, is that if baseball returned, it would happen seven years from now. “We have a long time to find a realistic solution,” he said.
THE time may well be much longer than seven years, given wrestling’s status as the odds-on favorite. But the inclusion of wrestling has caused much head-scratching, even among Olympic higher-ups.
The former executive board member Denis Oswald, an I.O.C. voter and a candidate to replace the current I.O.C. president, told reporters in June that there were “other ways to warn” wrestling that it needed to shape up. Several consultants, and some fans, have described the process as “ludicrous,” given that the original point of this expensive exercise was to bring new blood into the Games.
“I think a lot of people will conclude that this whole thing was a charade,” said Brett Erasmus, author of Brett’s Squash Blog, which has a widget on its front page counting down the seconds until the vote in Buenos Aires. “I’m sure a lot of other sports would conclude the same thing. It is disheartening. You get the sense that we will never have a chance, no matter what we do.”
Mr. Payne, the former Olympics marketing director, thinks that squash’s and baseball-softball’s most likely paths to the Games will come with the election of a new I.O.C. president. That vote is Sept. 10, and Mr. Payne expects that the winner will be less wedded to the current cap of 28 sports in the Games.
Perhaps that president would fast-track the entry of a new sport in a tighter window than the seven years it typically takes. Otherwise, the Olympics roster in 2020 won’t offer anything that could be called new. Unless you count a spiffed-up version of a sport first seen at the Games 2,800 years ago.
Men's pole sports would be right up there with men's rhythmic gymnastics for me.
As for chasing the cheese down the hill, are there international competitions? Is it fair to the lactose-intolerent Asian and African nations?
Hmmmmm,if today i make a baby he will be ready for Olympics of 2020.
train him in chasing cheese and pole sports.
Istanbul would have been crazy...
Quote:
Madrid and Istanbul Respond Differently to Rejection by Olympics
Daniel Ochoa De Olza/Associated Press
Spaniards had hoped that a Madrid Olympic Games could create jobs and revive the country's economy.
By RAPHAEL MINDER and CEYLAN YEGINSU
Published: September 8, 2013
MADRID — Madrid and Istanbul started counting the costs on Sunday of failing once more to be named an Olympic host, after Tokyo was chosen to organize the 2020 Games.
That cost could be higher for Madrid, whose population, hit hard by record unemployment and a long recession, had rallied around the idea that the Games could help create jobs and revive the image and economy of Spain.
In contrast, large groups of people in the central Taksim district in Istanbul celebrated their city’s Olympic defeat on Saturday night. They argued that the Turkish government had tried to use the Olympics as an excuse to ignore environmental concerns and proceed with large-scale building projects.
With 80 percent of its earmarked Olympic venues already completed, Madrid’s bid was centered on a straightforward argument: we have built the sites already, so let us at least use them.
Madrid, Spain’s capital and largest city, now faces a new challenge, as it scrambles to reduce $9.2 billion in debt as it figures out what to do with some of its half-built or underused sports centers, including a water sports complex that was to serve as the Olympic swimming pool. Construction on the aquatic center started in 2004, but the work was halted four years later amid budget overruns as Spain’s construction bubble burst.
Among Madrid’s other underexploited flagship sites is the Caja Mágica, or Magic Box, a tennis center with a retractable roof that opened in 2009, with intentions of holding Olympic events. The center ended up costing $387 million, compared with an initial budget of $158 million, but it has been used little since, except for a Masters tennis tournament held each May.
The voting was carried out in Buenos Aires by secret ballot, making it impossible to know why members of the International Olympic Committee favored Tokyo over Istanbul and Madrid. But a negative factor shared by the two losing cities, their countries’ response to doping in sports, might have played a role.
Turkey recently announced a “zero tolerance” stance on doping after a string of positive test results that led to the ban of more than 30 athletes by the Turkish Athletics Federation. In 2011, however, Turkey lost its World Anti-Doping Agency accreditation after failing to comply with international standards.
A Spanish judge fueled international criticism in April, when she ordered that about 200 bags of blood and plasma be destroyed instead of handing them over to antidoping inspectors. The bags were among evidence seized by the police during a cycling investigation focusing on Eufemiano Fuentes, a Spanish doctor found guilty of endangering public health by providing blood transfusions to cyclists. During his trial, Fuentes said his list of clients also included unnamed athletes from soccer, tennis, boxing and track and field.
The Madrid delegation hoped that the investigation had been put to rest, but the doping issue was raised Saturday before the vote in Buenos Aires, both during Madrid’s presentation to the Olympic delegates and in a news conference.
A few hours later, after Madrid was rejected, disenchantment and sadness spread rapidly among the large crowd that had gathered around Puerta de Alcalá, one of Madrid’s landmarks, where local musicians performed before the vote.
In Istanbul, however, recent social divisions were highlighted Saturday as supporters and opponents of the Olympics gathered at separate sites. After Istanbul failed in its fifth Olympic bid, some cried and others embraced in the ancient square of Sultanahmet. Most just stood still, lowering their Turkish flags.
In Taksim Square, those who had opposed the bid celebrated late into the night. Taksim had been turned into a battleground in June after disputes over the razing of a public park evolved into the largest antigovernment rally the country had had in more than a decade. Analysts have said that one of the largest setbacks for Turkey’s Olympic bid was the government’s harsh crackdown on the protesters.
“We’ve been tear-gassed too many times to have any Olympic spirit left in us,” said Ali Turan, an architect who has been active with the “Boycott Istanbul 2020” campaign in Istanbul. “This city has to learn to value its people and environment before it makes any promises to the world.”
The campaign was led by a group of urban planners and architects who carried out an assessment of Istanbul’s candidate file and concluded that it was a “megaconstruction pitch,” devoid of the Olympic ideals of legacy, spirit and sustainability.
“In Turkey’s candidate file, there are no environmental assessments, no ecological consideration or evaluations of social impacts for those that will be displaced from their homes,” the group said via e-mail.
Separately, clashes between the police and students at Middle East Technical University in Ankara began Friday and continued into Saturday, with the police firing tear gas and water cannons at demonstrators who were protesting deforestation on their campus. The deforestation was led by the city to accommodate a road project.
After the Olympic vote, Ankara’s mayor, Melih Gokcek, wrote on Twitter that the antigovernment protesters were traitors who caused Istanbul to lose its bid.
Ceylan Yeginsu reported from Istanbul.
They need new uniforms for women like TKD.
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Wrestling, IOC make right moves in getting sport back on 2020 Olympics program
By Tracee Hamilton, Published: September 8
The International Olympic Committee made the right decision — and how often do we hear that? — when it voted Sunday to return wrestling, at least provisionally, to the Olympic program.
The fact that wrestling, one of the original Olympic sports — and I don’t mean original as in 1896, but original as in 708 B.C. — had to fight for its Olympic life was a defibrillator to the heart of the sport’s leadership and community: shocking, painful, and probably life-saving. Losing the international platform of the Olympics would have had a trickle-down effect, at least in this country, to college and high school programs.
The sport is resinstated for the 2020 and 2024 Games seven months after losing its spot, beating out baseball-softball and squash.
The 2020 Summer Olympics goes to Tokyo: The Japanese capital beats out Madrid and Istanbul for the honor of hosting the international athletic spectacle.
In February, the IOC voted on 25 “core” sports that would make up the Olympic program beginning with the 2020 Games. In a stunning move, wrestling was not on the list. To the sport’s credit, it immediately began grappling (couldn’t resist) with its perceived problems. Three days after the IOC’s decision, Raphael Martinetti resigned as president of FILA, the sport’s international governing body. Nenad Lalovic of Serbia was named acting president, and the sport immediately turned its attention to problems with its rules, gender equity and the internal workings of FILA.
On May 18, FILA met in Moscow to vote on the changes, and Lalovic was elected president, losing the “acting” from his title. Eleven days later, the IOC trimmed its list of eight possible sports for 2020 to three — and wrestling made the cut. The timing was no coincidence.
Baseball-softball and squash also made it to Sunday’s final vote. The pairing of baseball and softball is not advantageous to softball, but that sport has not spread as far or as fast as organizers hoped when it was added to the Games. It’s a loss for U.S. fans, because the American team was always good and fun to watch. Wrestling got 49 votes; the baseball-softball bid got 24 and squash got 22.
Karate, roller sports, sport climbing, wakeboarding and wushu were on the original list of eight possible inclusions, and the idea that this was wrestling’s competition was pretty sad, but indicative of the problems the IOC perceived in the running of the international body and the rules of the sport.
FILA changed some of its inner workings. It added two weight classes for women in time for the 2016 Games. And it adopted new rules that will make the action more aggressive. There will be less stalling and more scoring, and the winner will be decided on total points, not the best two-of-three periods. Stalling will be penalized. Offensive takedowns will earn two points. The matches will be faster and more exciting.
Wrestling needed that. The sport had changed quite a bit since 708 B.C. but not so much since 1896 — at least not enough. The world is more fast-paced, and the Olympics are trying to keep up. Even creaky sports like modern pentathlon — which I love, by the way — have avoided the chopping block by shortening their formats and creating more action.
The Committee for the Preservation of Olympic Wrestling moved quickly and boldly to improve the sport, at least by the standards of the IOC, and while the changes may not seem great to purists, the fact is wrestling needs the Olympics more than the Olympics needs wrestling. Sadly, the sport is still on trial; wrestling will be on the 2016 program and Sunday’s vote means it will be included in 2020 and 2024 as a provisional sport, which means it will continue to have to fight for its place in the Games.
Wrestling has 177 federations on six continents. At the 2012 Games in London, a record-setting 71 countries qualified for the Olympics, with 29 winning medals. That’s an impressive number, but without the Olympics, a wrestler’s ultimate goal would be the world championships, which get almost no attention.
The Olympics are not perfect: the haughty corruption of the IOC, the annoyance of NBC’s “packaging,” the debt and abandoned buildings they often leave in their wake, the failed drug tests, and on and on. But they have always been a favorite with me because every four years, we are able to see sports that otherwise don’t garner a lot of media attention, at least not in this country. Wrestling, modern pentathlon, team handball, Nordic combined — those are truly Olympic sports.
The IOC made the right decision Sunday. We should savor it — it happens with even less frequency than the Olympics themselves.
This pleases me. I watched it real time and I was happy to see such margins. I would take wrestling over all the other options. Not even a thought. Now we have over a decade to get our house in better order and start lobbying now. No matter what is brought in, you can't take out wrestling. That is just retarded. That would be like taking out the 100m or high jump. I mean... COME ON!!! :p
wrestling, one of the oldest Olympic sports and they decided to take it out.....WTF is wrong with people. Glad they have gotten their wits back about them and put it back. One of the few Olympic sports I actually watch, (besides the Judo comps.)
***Applause***
Yay, wrestling is back!
I was floored when they removed it. I mean, the first games were foot races, then boxing, wrestling and pankration which is a combination of boxing and wrestling, followed by chariot racing, discus and javelin throwing. Unless I'm mistaken, which is always a possibility, that was pretty much it for centuries. To remove a core event like wrestling was just stupid crazy.
I was as upset as any of us to hear Wrestling was out, but after reading this article (skip down to the 2nd post for the Wrestling info, I'm surprised it stayed in so long. It wasn't about the sport itself. It was about the international governing body overseeing the sport. After working with some NGBs, I completely understand how this could happen.
from what I read on your article it seems like someone dropped the ball on the wrestling side of the negotiations, of course it could be on both. I don't really like them changing rules per say, but it's not a bad thing for them to enact the takedown 2 point rule. I think it would add a bit more excitement. someone messed up for sure.
Indeed, Dgb76, it seems like it was more an issue of the NGB getting way too full of itself and basically ****ting in their own nest. It's one thing to have a sport that an audience can't follow. But it's a terminal thing not to give the IOC face when they are ultimately the ones that sign off on your sport. That's just foolish, but I can totally imagine how an NGB could get its head that far up its own ass. It's sad for the athletes.
While I understand why people are bored and confused by wrestling, I have to disagree with you, Gene. It's not wrestling's job to change in order to be considered a core sport. Personally, I never found it boring and I liked the rules as they were. It's also not wrestling's job to explain itself to people who haven't bothered to figure it out on their own given the massive resources available to all. I have issue with modernizing something simply to create wider appeal to people who are unwilling or unable to grasp it as it is. To me, wrestling's real problem is promotional, for sure, but it can be promoted as is. I'm getting tired of all this "it's a fast paced world now" bullshit. We gonna start giving MLB pitchers a time clock like in basketball now too because people find it boring to wait so long between pitches? Should TKD remove the gear in order to see more KO's? You see where I'm going with this, right? The fact that the IOC would leave wrestling, regardless of it's rule set, out of the core group is simply ridiculous. This is about money, not core sports. They would rather have something like downhill combat skateboarding or watch a woman wrap herself around a pole because more knuckledraggers would tune in, plain and simple. To disguise this as a spanking is crazy. It was a concerted effort to push out one sport to bring in another sport with a better draw. Nothing more, nothing less. All that other stuff is straw man bullshit! ;)
Nah... It's about the money Lebowski! More people like baseball than wrestling, that's all. More fans = more money. Squash never had a real chance IMO. If it had been between baseball and squash, I believe that more of the wrestling votes would have went to baseball. The Olympics is a for profit venture now. It shouldn't be, that goes directly against the spirit of the games, but that's the world we live in now. Nice huh.
BTW. I like the shooting. My grandmother competed, not in the olympics, just nationally. So I was exposed to that at quite a young age.
hey now....im totally down with downhill combat skateboarding AND girls wrapping themselves around poles.....