With Cochrane’s wrestling season going hard on the mat right now, you can be forgiven if you think the International Olympic Committee’s recent decision to drop the discipline from its core sports for the 2020 Summer Games is misguided.
Cochrane Cowboys head coach Vern McNeice has been in the gym pretty much daily, tutoring his club wrestlers and high-school competitors from Cochrane High, Bow Valley High and St. Timothy, preparing them for upcoming city, regional and provincial meets. So the IOC’s Feb. 12 decision to throw wrestling from the ring of medal sports in 2020 has left McNeice grappling for answers.
“It kills a dream, for sure,” McNeice said. “We’ve got kids, all of our competitive kids – and anyone who’s competed in any sport, the Olympics is the pinnacle of where you want to go. It’s a world-stage sporting event.
“Sadly, I think that commerce and bureaucracy have trumped the spirit of sport.”
But not in Cochrane.
The Cowboys Wrestling Club has swelled to 40-plus members this month with the inclusion of the three local high-school wrestling teams. The Cochrane High and Bow Valley High wrestlers will be competing at the Feb. 22-23 rural meet in High River and the St. Tim’s wrestlers will be at the Calgary city championships Feb. 28-March 1. All are vying for berths at high-school provincials in March.
Throw in the Cowboys’ big Western Canadian Youth invitational tournament March 2 at Spray Lake Sawmills Family Sports Centre – with more than 250 school-aged competitors from B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan expected to attend – and wrestling’s growing popularity at the grassroots level is easy to grasp.
And it’s why the IOC’s decision to count out a sport which has been at the core of the Olympics since 700 BC is that much more perplexing.
“There will be such an outcry from so many nations around the globe, I suspect there will be a change (in the decision),” McNeice speculated.
“There are so many people who wrestle. Canada is not a huge wrestling nation. But we have 2,000 people in Alberta alone who wrestle, who are registered with the Alberta Amateur Wrestling Association.”
And in Cochrane’s case, they’re not just out for participation medals. The Cowboys’ most recent exploits include gold medals for Isaiah Springer, Connor Pointen, Connor McNeice and Brendan McKeage on Feb. 16 at, appropriately enough, the Alberta Amateur Wrestling Junior Olympics in Hinton.
Regardless of the Olympic wrestling situation, it’s full-speed ahead for the Cowboys and the high-school wrestlers training for upcoming events.
“It’s our busiest time of the year,” coach McNeice said. “We’ve got all the high schools training with us now. Just being that there aren’t a whole bunch of kids at each high school, we’ve kind of provided a central place so the coaches can come down so the kids are all working out together along with all our other kids.”
