Golf and rugby score some points with IOC
Who knew that Fiji had so much pull at Olympus? When the International Olympic Committee’s executive board voted yesterday to recommend that golf and seven-a-side rugby be added to the summer program for 2016, it was the biggest sporting breakthrough for the South Pacific archipelago since its athletes first turned up at the 1956 Games. With their super-sturdy ruggers and Vijay Singh, who will be only 53 then, the Fijians will have their best chance ever to win an Olympic medal.
It wasn’t a surprise that the 15-member board (with president and former rugger Jacques Rogge abstaining) said yes to those two sports and no to baseball, softball, karate, squash, and roller sports. That’s how the smart betting had figured it for weeks. Yet it’s still far from certain that the entire 106-member session will agree when it votes in October a week after choosing among Chicago, Tokyo, Madrid, and Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 host city.
The last time the Lords rejiggered the program in 2005, they dumped baseball and softball for 2012, then turned thumbs down on squash and karate by hefty margins after they’d already selected them from a five-sport wish list that also included golf and rugby. That was par for the course, if you will, for a bunch of folks who are known for balking at rubber-stamping proposals from their own commissions.
Vancouver, which was an obvious choice to stage next year’s Winter Games, nearly was beaten on the first round of balloting by Pyeongchang, a Korean resort most members probably could not have spelled or located on a map. With Pyeongchang the top contender for 2014 (and the leader after the first ballot), the IOC opted for Sochi, based on little more than then Russian president Vladimir Putin’s $12 billion we-will-build-it-if-you-come promise.
Most telling about yesterday’s vote was that golf nearly was eliminated in the early balloting and needed four more rounds to get a majority after rugby was approved. And we’re talking about a sport that fulfills the IOC’s entire checklist of desired qualities: universal, popular, gender-equal, drug-free, telegenic, inexpensive to stage.
What helped golf’s case hugely was that its top stars - Tiger Woods, Lorena Ochoa, and others - not only lobbied for it but promised to play.
“Who is one of the major icons of the world? Tiger Woods,’’ said Rogge. “This is a very important sport.’’
The question now is how the PGA and LPGA will work their summer tours around the Games, as they’ve said they would, and how the Ryder Cup might be affected that year. But the disruption would be modest relative to what the NHL goes through for the Winter Games, and the format is what the players are used to: 72 holes of stroke play over four days for a field of 60, with the world’s top 15 assured entry.
By the IOC’s yardstick, golf should have been a tap-in for inclusion. “I think it should have been in the Olympics a while ago,’’ Woods said yesterday. Yet the sport reportedly garnered only one vote in each of the first two rounds and didn’t pass karate until the fourth ballot. The clear favorite was rugby, which probably is what knocked softball out of the box.
The biggest reason for the IOC to readmit softball would have been to boost the number of females in the Games. But with a dozen 12-woman teams, rugby would offer 24 more than softball, and that’s not counting the 36 that the executive board added for 2012 by approving women’s boxing (the last all-male sport on the program) yesterday. So softball, which didn’t get more than two votes in any round, was left on deck. Baseball, with its ongoing doping problems and inability to deliver its top stars, never had a chance.
What’s most attractive to the IOC about golf and rugby is that they’re not only global, but competitively so. Check the world rankings and you’ll see a United Nations spreadsheet: South Africa, Australia, Argentina, Wales, Ireland, and, yes, Fiji. With the US, China, and Russia hogging the multi-medal sports, anything that gives athletes from small countries a chance to see their flag and hear their anthem is welcome.
This wouldn’t be the first time that these two sports have been on the Olympic menu. Golf was held in 1900 and 1904, then dropped in 1908 after a boycott by the British left Canadian defending champion George Lyon as the only man in the field (he refused the gold-medal gimme). Rugby, the 15-man version, ended in 1924 after Parisian fans booed the Americans off the medal stand after they crushed France in the final.
Now their time has come around again, just as it did for tennis after 64 years out of the Games. The IOC members will get to vote separately on each sport and could turn thumbs down on both. If they do that, though, Singh might chase them all the way to the Alps with a 9-iron, backed by Jone Daunivucu and half a dozen of his strapping rugger comrades. The Lords can stiff-arm roller skaters and squash players, but they snub Fiji at their peril.
John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com. 
