Wrestling to be axed from the Olympics?

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Wrestling was left in a state of shock after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) made a surprise recommendation on Tuesday to drop the sport from the 2020 Games.

Contested in the first modern Olympics in 1896 and part of the ancient Games in Olympia, wrestling will now join seven other candidate sports battling for one spot in a revamped program.

It is unlikely, however, that it will get a reprieve when the IOC session in Buenos Aires votes on the recommendation in September as this would defeat the purpose of Tuesday's vote.

"This is not the end of the process, this is purely a recommendation," IOC spokesman Mark Adams told reporters following an Executive Board meeting.

"We were greatly astonished by today's recommendation of the IOC Executive Board not to maintain wrestling among the 25 core sports for the 2020 Olympic Games," the international wrestling federation said in a statement.

It said the federation was represented in 180 countries, "with wrestling being the national sport in a fair amount of them and the only possibility for athletes to represent their country at the Olympic Games, thus contributing to their universality.

"It is very unfortunate," Satpal Singh, coach of India's twice Olympic medal winner Sushil Kumar, told Reuters. "It is being played from the first Olympics and is played all over the world."

The 15-member executive board needed four rounds of voting to decide on wrestling with pentathlon, hockey, canoeing and taekwondo also getting votes to be dropped from the Games.

Canoeing scored the fewest and was eliminated first with taekwondo following it to safety in the next round, leaving three sports in the decider.

Wrestling got eight votes against it in the final round of voting with hockey and pentathlon tied at three votes each.

The IOC said 25 of the 26 Olympic sports were elected as core sports for the 2020 Games which will also include rugby and golf, making their first appearance in 2016.

Wrestling joins baseball and softball, making a joint bid, martial arts karate and wushu, rollersports, wakeboarding, squash and sports climbing as candidates for the one open spot.

Madrid, Tokyo and Istanbul are bidding to host the 2020 Olympics with a decision also to be taken in September.