Tasser: Olympic wrestling cause brings United States, Iran together

The International Olympic Committee’s recent decision to drop wrestling from its list of 25 “core” sports for the 2020 Summer Olympics was met with shock and outrage around the world.

Many countries have formed committees to assist FILA, wrestling’s international governing body, to make a push for reinstatement into the Olympic Games, bringing together two unlikely allies in an attempt to save Olympic wrestling: the United States and Iran.

Yes, you read that right; America and Iran agree on something.

Like the famous “pingpong diplomacy” that helped thaw icy relations between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China in 1971, athletics again are uniting people from different countries that are at odds politically.

Why can’t wrestling diplomacy work?

The blow from the IOC’s decision perhaps hit hardest in Iran, where wrestling is a national sport intrinsically tied to the culture. Wrestling dates back to the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the sixth century B.C., when the sport was included in military training. Ancient texts describe legendary Persian kings taking their opponents to the ground, and the tradition of “Zurkhaneh” (literally “house of strength,” and describing chivalric competition and high personal values through sport) holds a particular mystique in Iranian male culture even today.

Wrestling is also Iran’s biggest Olympic medal winner: At the London 2012 Games, Iranian wrestlers tied for third with six total medals, including three golds. Iran even boasts a professional wrestling league, the Iranian Premier Wrestling League, which features legitimate freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling, very much unlike the theatrical and contrived World Wrestling Entertainment we have in the U.S.

This week, on the eve of the Iranian nuclear talks and at a time of particularly high tension between the U.S. and Iran, the U.S. freestyle national team was in the Iranian capital of Tehran competing in the Wrestling World Cup. An ABC News report video shows an ecstatic crowd cheering for both the U.S. and Iranian teams while holding signs reading “We are all wrestling fans” and “Save Olympic wrestling” in both English and Farsi, the language of Iran. The video also captured Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shaking hands with U.S. wrestling coach Zeke Jones.

American Olympic gold medalist Jordan Burroughs, a two-time NCAA champion at the University of Nebraska, received a LeBron James-like reception at the event, with fans chanting his name during his match and mobbing him for videos and autographs on his way back to the team bus; all of this despite Burroughs defeating an Iranian in a gold-medal match in London last summer.

And to top it off, the U.S. and Iranian wrestling federations led an IOC protest during the opening ceremonies, where a team member from each of the 13 participating nations — other participating countries included Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Japan, Russia, South Korea and Turkey — held up a sign that read “Olympics without wrestling: Never, never …” in both English and Farsi.

“Politically, we’re not always on the same page with Iran, or politically with Russia,” USA Wrestling spokesperson Mitch Hull said in an international news report, “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.”

Hojatollah Khatib, the head of the Iranian Wrestling Federation, also stated he hopes that “this unprecedented unity” can help reverse the IOC’s decision.

In the name of a sport, political adversaries can see eye-to-eye.

Maybe unity will help lessen tensions between the two nations and accomplish their mutual goal of saving Olympic wrestling.

Maybe neither will happen.

But one thing is certain: The U.S. and Iran agreeing about one thing is better than them not agreeing at all.

Write Donnie at dtf6@pitt.edu.