The Olympic future of wrestling will undoubtedly be decided at the end of May, in Saint Petersburg. Threatened to disappear from the program after the Rio Games in 2016, sport will have a “grand oral” before the IOC Executive Board, meeting in Russia on the occasion of the SportAccord convention. The seven other candidates for entry into the Games (or a return, in the case of wrestling) will try the same exercise. But, according to several internal sources at the IOC, only karate, squash and wrestling would have a chance.
The International Wrestling Federation (FILA) therefore has less than two weeks left to review its copy and prepare its argument. Hurry up. The time has come for mobilization. But, curiously, its leaders are torn apart. The former president, the Swiss Raphaël Martinetti, forced to resign after the IOC's decision to exclude wrestling, appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) at the beginning of the month in the hope of preventing the holding of the an Extraordinary Congress, organized over the next two days (May 18 and 19) in Moscow. The Swiss also contested, still before the CAS, the election of his successor, the Serb Nenad Lalovic, appointed by his peers to act as interim.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport dismissed Raphaël Martinetti's claim. But it nevertheless allowed him to remain a member of the Directorate. The FILA Congress will take place. But in what atmosphere? Certainly, the Olympic future of wrestling is at the top of the agenda. The Federation must approve the proposed changes to make wrestling more attractive and more modern. But the Congress must also ratify by a vote the election of Nenad Lalovic for the end of the mandate of his predecessor, scheduled for September 2014. A vote which could well weaken the FILA consensus.
Fortunately, the reality on the ground reveals another face. Since the decision of the IOC Executive Board to propose its exclusion from the Games, the struggle has been mobilizing, multiplying initiatives and discovering allies whose existence it did not know. At the start of the week, a meeting of an unprecedented kind took place in New York, in a room at Central Station, in the middle of Manhattan. Called “Rumble on the Rails”, it brought together American, Russian and Iranian wrestlers on the same competition mat. The event was intended to be symbolic of the solidarity of a sport whose presence at the Games dates back more than a century. “Politics would never succeed in bringing together representatives of these three countries around the same cause,” said a leader of the American Federation. But we did it. And we will do it again if necessary, to save our sport. »
On the eve of the competition, American, Russian and Iranian wrestlers held a press conference in the United Nations building. The place was also intended to be highly symbolic. It is now up to their leaders to follow the same path.
