Aug

19

The IOC is completely ruining the Olympics.  Although I don’t mind the recent commercialization of the Olympics because it has brought and kept higher quality athletes, the IOC has gotten too obsesed with making money on the Olympics. 

Here is my prediction: Greco-Roman (and possibly Freestyle) Wrestling’s last Olympics will be in 2020.  That’s right, I think the oldest and one of the most traditional of Olympic sports will be dropped from the modern Olympics after the 2020 games.

First, some background.  Unless you have wrestled or have been part of a wrestling family, you probably won’t find wrestling entertaining to watch.  It’s a simple fact of life that wrestling can not be a spectator’s sport short of turning into WWF….oops….WWE.

The basic rules have been in place forever: three rounds of wrestling, score points for moves, if there is no fall during the match then the wrestler with the highest score wins.  The IOC felt that there wasn’t enough ACTION and SCORING in the sport so they insisted that FILA change the rules.  Now, you win rounds and instead of just wrestling each round you split up the round into three parts.  First minute of a round you wrestle.  Then 30 seconds of mat wrestling with a random wrestler chosen to decide his position.  Final 30 seconds of mat wrestling where the other wrestler has his choice of position.  Tie round goes to the last wrestler to score.

Not only are these rules terrible but they do exactly the opposite of what the IOC wants; they decrease scoring and action.  Only having a minute of standing wrestling is usually not enough time for greco wrestlers to setup and perform moves. 

Most of the greco matches I saw had no action in the first minute of the rounds.  Just a bunch of hand slapping.  That means that the round was decided through random chance and low scoring mat wrestling.  It gets worse.  Some scoring for escape moves was removed, which decreases the motivation for one of the wrestlers to even try a move during mat wrestling.  Finally, since the last one to score wins then wrestlers who felt they could win in the last part of the round would basically stall (i.e. try not to make any moves) so that they could score in the last round, get the tie and win for being the last one to score.

Finally, these rule changes made/make it very easy for the best wrestler to lose.  This happened in a match beween a Chinese wrestler and an American wrestler.  Chinese wrestler score 6 points in the first round with some great moves.  Round goes to he Chinese wrestler. Second round the American scores last in a boring 1-1 tie and wins the round.  Third round the American wrestler scores last in another boring 1-1 tie.  The Chinese Wrestler kicked the American’s butt by out scoring him 8-2 AND LOST THE MATCH!!  Many favored wrestlers were beat in the qualifying round of wrestling and had no chance for a medal.

I think the IOC decided that wrestling wasn’t bringing in enough money, force rule changes they knew would mess up the sport and the next step they will take is to remove the sport since it is so messed up now.

Oh yeah……there have been some weird things going on in Women’s Gymnastics, too.

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