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Sports in Brief | Olympic panel may drop several sports

Compiled By The Inquirer Staff 8/30/02

Baseball, softball and modern pentathlon have three months to save their sports from being dropped from the Olympics. Ballroom dancing, surfing and bowling can forget about trying to get into the Games.

The International Olympic Committee's executive board, meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, discussed an internal report yesterday proposing the biggest shake-up in the sports program in the history of the Summer Games.

The IOC program commission has recommended eliminating baseball, softball and modern pentathlon, as well as certain events in wrestling, equestrian, rowing, sailing, canoe-kayak and others.

The report proposes adding golf and rugby - on the condition that the sports' top athletes take part.

The executive board put off a decision on the proposals until its next meeting in late November in Mexico City. Cutting sports requires a simple majority of the assembly of more than 120 members. A two-thirds majority is needed to add sports.

The IOC board rejected applications of 14 sports, among them ballroom dancing, surfing, bowling, bridge, chess, billiards, squash, water skiing and racquetball.

The last time a sport was removed from the Olympics was in 1936, when polo was dropped.

The commission report also recommended dropping Greco-Roman wrestling, canoe-kayak slalom, three-day events in equestrian, race walking in track and field, keelboat class in sailing, the synchronized swimming team event, light-weight rowing event, and the badminton mixed-doubles event, as well as a reduction in athletes and events in shooting.

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Olympic gold-medal wrestling champion Rulon Gardner resumed workouts with the U.S. team this week, seven months after losing a toe to frostbite.

Gardner suffered frostbite when he was stranded for 17 hours in subzero temperatures during a Feb. 14 snowmobiling trip in Wyoming.

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IOC puts baseball, softball decisions on hold

By Vicki Michaelis, USA TODAY 8/30/02

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — America's pastime received at least one stay Thursday as the International Olympic Committee's executive board postponed until November a decision on whether to cut baseball and other sports from the Summer Games. (Related item: Proposed program changes)

The board's 15 members discussed an internal report that recommends dropping baseball, softball and modern pentathlon, as well as specific events in several other sports, while adding golf and rugby in time for the 2008 Summer Games.

The board wants to talk to the federations that govern the jeopardized sports.

IOC President Jacques Rogge called the report, from the IOC's program commission, "a shot across the bow of these federations that we think that there is a problem there. Will the problem lead to exclusion? I don't know."

Polo was the last sport cut from the Olympics in 1936.

Rogge wants Summer Games limits: 10,500 athletes, 300 events, 28 sports.

At IOC meetings in late November, if the board agrees with the recommendations, it will pass them on to the more than 120 IOC members at the meetings for a vote. It requires a two-thirds majority to add a sport, a simple majority to cut one.

The report outlines three reasons for excluding baseball, the first two of which they also applied to softball:

Lack of global popularity. Because baseball's appeal is largely concentrated in North and Latin America and parts of Asia, it gets small television audiences and media coverage in many parts of the world.
Costly Olympic venues. Few cities outside baseball's primary areas of interest have good enough ballparks to host Olympic competition. They are expensive to build and draw little demand for use after the Games.
Lack of best athletes. Officials have difficulty getting active major leaguers on Olympic rosters. Japan's top players only recently agreed to play in the Olympics.
Modern pentathlon, the report said, is so costly to train for because of its multiple disciplines (fencing, swimming, shooting, horseback riding and running) that it discourages the development of young athletes.

The report evaluated the sports on technical merit. Rogge said the board and members would make a more "political" evaluation.

The USA, which swept the gold medals in baseball and softball at the last Olympics, has one executive board member, Jim Easton, and three IOC members overall.

The IOC's decisions on events within sports might not come until July, Rogge said Thursday.

The report recommends cutting events within nine sports, including wrestling, where freestyle and Greco-Roman are in the Olympics.

The report noted "low public and media comprehension of differences between the two wrestling disciplines" and suggested one be cut. Since women's freestyle was the only sport added for the 2004 Athens Games, it would seem Greco-Roman is the one at risk, although the IOC wouldn't elaborate.

Cuts under consideration

The IOC's executive board is considering several proposals for changes made in a report by the IOC's program commission. The board took some action Thursday, such as rejecting the requests of 14 sports that wanted to be added for the 2008 Summer Games. The recommendations below, if passed, would become effective at the 2008 Games in Beijing, unless otherwise noted.

Recommended cuts:

Baseball
Modern pentathlon
Softball.
Recommended additions:

Golf
Rugby
Recommended cuts of disciplines within sports:

Badminton, mixed doubles
Canoe-kayak, slalom canoe
Equestrian, three-day event
Rowing, all lightweight events
Sailing, keelboat class
Shooting, unspecified disciplines
Swimming, synchronized team
Track and field, racewalking
Wrestling, one unspecified discipline
Rejected new sports:

Air sports, such as parachuting
Ballroom dancing
Billiards
Boules, a French game similar to boccie
Bowling
Bridge
Chess
Polo
Racquetball
Roller sports
Squash
Surfing
Underwater sports, such as fin swimming
Water skiing
New sports still under review (could be added by 2008 Beijing Games):

Karate, Wushu (Chinese martial art)
Rejected new disciplines:

Soccer, futsal (indoor, five-per-side)
Gymnastics, aerobics and acrobatics
Boxing, women's
Disciplines added (effective 2004):

Fencing, women's sabre
Disciplines cut (effective 2004):

Fencing, women's team foil

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OUR OPINIONS: No reason strong enough for a Title IX takedown

Staff
Friday, August 30, 2002

When Agnus Berenato graduated from high school in 1975 as an all-star athlete, there were virtually no sports scholarships for women. One of 10 children of a widowed mother, her only option was to go to France and play basketball professionally.

A few years later came a phone call from the women's basketball coach at the University of North Carolina, and, "He started talking to me about this thing called Title IX."

She came home, played brilliantly for UNC, became a coach and is now running the women's basketball program at Georgia Tech. She is paid as much as her male counterpart and coaches girls recruited from around the country with full scholarships.

"Basketball gave me everything in my life except my husband and children," she said.

She and other women and girls who finally have a chance to play sports and go to college are the reason why enforcement of Title IX must remain strong, despite challenges from some male athletes who claim they are being penalized by it.

This week, at a hearing on whether the enforcement of Title IX should be weakened, Berenato listened to a number of male wrestlers and their coaches lamenting that their college programs had been cut. Their universities had told them they were eliminating male athletes to keep the correct ratio with women athletes to comply with Title IX.

Indeed, the National Wrestling Coaches Association and others have filed suit against the U.S. Department of Education, claiming that Title IX requires quotas and that women are not as interested in sports as men. They want the federal government to eliminate a requirement that aims at having the ratio of women athletes reflect the ratio of women enrolled in the school.

The case is pending; meanwhile President Bush asked his education secretary to appoint a commission to study the effects of Title IX and consider whether the enforcement regulations should be changed.

They should not. The wrestlers' argument that they have suffered pales in comparison to the good Title IX has done for so many women and girls. It may be easier for a university to say Title IX required the cut, but there is nothing in the law or the enforcement guidelines that would require cutting men's teams. In fact, while Title IX helped increase the number of female athletes by more than 400 percent, the number of male athletes also rose by more than 20 percent.

Female athletes still represent only 70 percent of the number of male athletes, and for every dollar spent on women's athletics, $3 is spent on men's. Those colleges cutting male athletes are blaming high-level budget decisions on Title IX. The simple truth is, however, that those athletic departments are often funneling more and more money into big men's sports such as football and basketball.

Only 6 percent of high school athletes of either gender will get those precious spots on collegiate teams, those scholarships that so often make a college education possible. No reason is compelling enough to challenge the right of women to have an equal shot at those gems.

And if the president's commission comes back with a recommendation otherwise, he may find himself dealing with the fury of 52 percent of the voting public. Title IX helped many women play on high-school teams and go to college; their daughters are now playing high-school sports. Weakening support of this landmark law will not escape their notice.