Seven months after being dropped from a list of core sports wrestling was reinstated to the 2020 Olympic Games. The International Olympic Committee, meeting in Argentina, voted to add wrestling over baseball-softball and squash to the 2020 games which were awarded to Tokyo.
The result provided a sense of relief to Dan Gable who helped lead the effort to save wrestling as on Olympic sport. “I’m just happy and excited to say that if we hadn’t won this vote we wouldn’t have given up. It would have been harder to move forward, because we won the vote it will be easier. It’s always easier to work on success than defeat,” Gable says.
Gable says the effort to improve international wrestling and make it a better sport must continue. “It’s really were we go from here to make this sport a top five core sport, which we are not even in the core, so we have a long ways to go yet,” according to Gable.
Each sport had the opportunity to make a presentation before the I-O-C and Gable says at that point he was confident wrestling would win the vote. “The presentation went further than the other ones, it’s almost like they want to put us in, you know, if we can we want to,” Gable says. He says the presentations were outstanding and the build up was they were probably going to be in. “It’s no more probably, we are.”