Olympics Redux

For those of you scoring at home, this is not the first time squash has suffered a disappointment about not getting into the Olympics. It wasn’t a twelve-year journey of disappointment, as WSF president Ramachandran said today after the latest hopes were dashed.

If only. In the mid-1980s the WSF (back when it was the ISRF) pushed hard to get squash included in the 1992 Barcelona Games. In 1986 the IOC recognized squash. Since then squash has been working on getting into the Games. It happened for the Atlanta Games—I was there this past weekend and people were talking about that effort. The campaign is probably more or less exactly thirty years old, not twelve. It is better to take a longer view.

Here is what a smart person wrote this morning about the latest decision: “Squash has work to do on its fundamentals, from the WSF on down, and the Olympics is not a silver bullet. Of course it would be nice to have the world stage open to our sport, and we will be there eventually. Today is no worse than it was yesterday.  Let’s focus on what we can control and do it better than anyone else could.”

Good words of advice.

Look what I wrote here during the Beijing Games:

http://squashword.wpengine.com/?p=176632248

One thought on “Olympics Redux”

  1. In the immortal words of Lawrence Peter ” Yogi” Berra,
    ” It’s Over.” Actually it’s been over for decades, and all the English pros saying that they are “gutted” by the rejection are simply in a state of denial. Can we finally move on and admit once and for all that network TV advertisers would rather show Brazilian female beach volleyball players in microscopic bikinis than Ramy Ashour and Mohamed El Shorbagy hitting a rubber ball around a glass box?

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