USA Wrestling reiterated its efforts toward having the sport reinstated to the 2020 Olympics schedule during a tournament in Tehran Tuesday, and explained that it plans to cooperate with every nation, from Iran, to Russia, to Cuba in order to see their goals met before an IOC executive board vote this May in St. Petersburg.
“We’ll be standing arm-in-arm with Iran, and we’ll be standing with Russia as we will with lots of other countries,” Mitch Hull, national teams director for USA Wrestling, told the AP. “Those [countries] really do make a difference because politically we’re not always on the same page, or politically with Russia. But in wrestling, there’s no doubt that we are all together in this effort and we consider Iran one of our strongest allies in the sport of wrestling...
“We have great confidence that we can work with the Iranian wrestling federation, Iranian wrestlers and the Iranian people to show the world that, no matter what’s happening politically, we have the same goal and the same belief and passion about the sport of wrestling”
The cooperation between the nations is being compared to the famous “Ping-pong Diplomacy” of the early-70s, which saw matches between U.S. and Chinese players - with the slogan “Friendship First, Competition Second” - that eventually paved the way for then President Nixon to visit Beijing.
On the U.S. side, officials created the Committee for the Preservation of Olympic Wrestling Monday in hopes of mobilizing and energizing America in support of the sport’s reinstatement, while Iran’s Olympic Committee sent a letter of protest to the IOC last week regarding the decision.
Wrestling can be reinstated over seven other prospective sports, including squash, karate, sport climbing, wakeboarding, roller sports, wushu, and baseball/softball’s joint bid, if they can make it through an IOC executive meeting this May that will pare down the best options of those eight sports. It would then need to win another vote among all the IOC members this September in Buenos Aires.