It has been scarcely a week since the International Olympic Committee announced its intention to exclude wrestling from the 2020 Summer Games, and the campaign to "Save Wrestling" is in full swing.
Donald Rumsfeld and John Irving, both former wrestlers, took to the op-ed pages to celebrate the sport's Olympic legacy (which dates to the first Olympic Games in 776 B.C.) and its current popularity. Raphael Martinetti, the ineffectual president of wrestling's international federation, FILA, has been ousted. Millions of dollars have been raised — Wall Street has a lot of former high school and college wrestlers — to underwrite a push for readmission before the IOC makes its final decision in May.
"It's not in a wrestler's DNA to hop on a plane and kiss a lot of ass," says Michael E. Novogratz, a hedge-fund manager in New York who wrestled at Princeton University. "But that's exactly what we're going to be doing over the next three months."