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" Today, the International Olympic Committee&amp;#039;s executive board decided, as it normally does after a competition, to drop a sport from its 2020 games. And it chose wrestling. Wrestling. A sport that predates even the ancient Olympics by thousands of years \u2014 now gone. Wrestling is as old as Man. And not just as a means of winning a desired mating partner or the choice bits of mammoth. As Kendall Blanchard writes in The Anthropology of Sport, a plaque from the Sumerian civilization in 3,000-4,000 B.C. shows three pairs of wrestlers grappling, and there is &amp;quot;no barroom brawl or awkward mauling this prehistoric contest; the deliberate moves, the skills, and style all speak to sport.&amp;quot; There were cave drawings of thousands of spectators watching men wrestling years before that, some dating back to 7,000 B.C. Later, the sport appeared in Genesis, and some believe it falls within the teachings of Mohammed. In Greece, children went to a palaestra, wrestling schools named after Hermes&amp;#039;s daughter, Palaestra, the goddess of wrestling. In the 700s B.C., ancient Olympics featured a bout as the final event of a pentathlon. It was a more brutal sport then. Men couldn&amp;#039;t bite, nor could they grab hold of their opponent&amp;#039;s crotch. But they could break one another&amp;#039;s fingers. Wrestling also punctuated the pentathlon in the early decades of the modern Olympics; it&amp;#039;s since been replaced with a combination of running and shooting. But wrestling on its own has been a part of all but one (1900, Paris) contemporary Olympics since its inaugural competition in 1896. Last year, 344 men and women competed in 18 different medal events, between the freestyle and Greco-Roman forms. Sports modernize. Equipment improves. Rules change to become humane. For instance, wrestlers can no longer legally break their combatant&amp;#039;s fingers. But the IOC recommended removing wrestling mostly for reasons having to do with popularity, like TV ratings and ticket sales (anti-doping was also one of the 39 factors). Sure, maybe wrestling must also change. Maybe 18 events is too many \u2014 though canoeing, rowing, and shooting all had similar numbers of medals. But the IOC&amp;#039;s decision will now pit wrestling against other sports that are infantile as it tries to fill the vacancy it is also making. It faces baseball (and softball), karate, climbing, wushu, squash, wakeboarding, and rollerskating. That&amp;#039;s right. Rollerskating. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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