This week I come not to bury FILA, but to praise FILA.
A friend suggested to me this week that the IOC board's recommended exclusion of wrestling might be the best thing that ever happened to the sport. He may be right. I hate to portray the IOC as a benign avian mother, but sometimes you need to toss the eaglet out of the nest if it's ever going to fly.
Nenad Lalovic (Photo/Alexander Oreshnikov)FILA, and its product, look to be quite improved. Unfortunately if the IOC assembly doesn't vote for wrestling in September, these changes will prove to be for naught. The weight of a sport's meaningful existence now lay on the shoulders of Lalovic and the FILA leadership. If wrestling retains its Olympic status, we ought to all sing their praise. If the IOC assembly decides to throw wrestling into the bottomless abyss of irrelevance, then a heaping pile of blame should be at their feet. It's feast or famine, this time no credit is awarded for silver or bronze.
My advice, for what it's worth, to FILA would be to keep implementing improvements between now and September, and implement those improvements as swiftly as possible.
If I were in charge of international wrestling (maybe one day), my strategy would focus on three areas.
First would be an expansion of national, continental, and World championships in the schoolboy/girl age group. Also seeing how English is one of FILA's two official languages, change the age group's name to something that doesn't sound so silly in English. Cadet and Junior are fine, but the thought of a "Schoolboy" World champion lacks a certain amount of gravity.
Increasing the amount of international competition at a younger age could only have positive effects on the growth of the sport. Young wrestlers will have greater incentive to specialize in the sport sooner in their athletic lives. Additionally, wrestlers can start generating buzz for their eventual senior level debuts if they build a strong international pedigree at a younger age.
Second, I would take a more active hand in providing worldwide high quality Internet broadcasts of importance and encouraging event coverage from a wider array of media outlets. I haven't a clue exactly how I would do either. Perhaps I would farm the broadcasts out to a capable third party. Attracting media coverage is outside my wheelhouse, but a good place to start would be in finding human interest stories among the athletes and floating these stories to interested corners of the media world.
Third, I would commission a talent development wing of my organization to cultivate wrestling in far flung areas around the globe which are important but perhaps not as highly represented in worldwide wrestling as we would like. Because I couldn't develop the wrestling program in every country I would like, I would target the programs in four strategically important countries.
First would be China and India. Both possess monstrous populations and growing economic footprints with millions of potential fans hungry to get behind a countryman (or woman) who will bring home World and Olympic medals. Particularly in India, wrestling holds vital cultural significance and its three world/Olympic medalists of the last decade have garnered attention from the country's mainstream media.
Second I would target both Nigeria and Venezuela. Wrestling needs established powers in Africa and South America, and these are the best candidates. Both, two years ago, had male freestyle wrestlers in the bronze-medal match at the World Championship. Nigeria's Sinivie Boltic carried Nigeria's flag in London's opening ceremony, and while Daniel Igali won Olympic gold for Canada, he first learned to wrestle in his native Nigeria. While both of these countries lack general wealth, they are both members of OPEC. This sweetens the pot, as it is never a bad thing to have more petroleum money on the side of wrestling.
Wrestling isn't out of the woods yet, but FILA has shown the ability to change and to shepherd the sport through a particularly hairy situation. The, hard work, however, is only just beginning. Wrestling could still do a great deal to help itself in the coming vote and secure its position in the future. Unlike before, I think that FILA might actually be listening.
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