It’s the bottom of the 10th inning and the sport of Olympic softball is down and out.
In fact, it has been 33 days since softball was sent to the Olympic showers.
Game over? Not yet, say U.S. Olympic officials. Despite that bleak line score, USOC chairman Peter Ueberroth and leaders of the gold-medal American squad are digging in for a fight to reinstate softball to the Olympic program.
Some of the softball bunch hope to reverse the sport’s Olympic death sentence by this February, when the IOC gathers for the Turin Winter Games.
“I’ve never played a game I didn’t think I was going to win. This is just another one of those,” said Ron Radigonda, executive director of USA Softball. “I feel we’re going to come out on the top end.”
That comeback attempt already is cooking. The sport’s backers are openly critiquing a July 8 vote by the International Olympic Committee to dump softball after 2008. All 28 Olympic sports faced a similar vote. Baseball also got the boot.
Last week, Ueberroth said some IOC members had confided to him that they mistakenly thought softball was closely linked to Olympic baseball – a sport long on the outs with the IOC because of the lack of a strong, big-league steroid policy and because star sluggers don’t play in the Olympics. That misunderstanding alone, Ueberroth has said, is cause to void the vote.
But in an interview Wednesday, USOC chief executive Jim Scherr added four more reasons: Softball, unlike other Olympic sports, never has had a drug problem; it is inexpensive to stage; the games, when on, draw solid TV ratings; and softball helps the IOC meet its goal of increasing the number of female Olympic athletes.
“If you take out softball, it clearly offsets that,” Scherr said. “It’s probably one of the last sports you would want to cut.”
The International Softball Federation has not yet formally asked the IOC for a fresh vote. The IOC’s executive board – which would consider such a request – meets in late October.
But IOC president Jacques Rogge has called the July vote final, and said softball’s leaders must wait until 2009 to again sell the IOC on the merits of their game. Each sport was judged on 33 criteria, including popularity, image and cost.
According to that analysis, softball was hurt by a “low number of hours of television coverage” in Athens, and because it relies heavily on Olympic revenues (86 percent) for its income versus other money streams such as marketing and broadcasting (2 percent.)
“The review of the Olympic programme … has been done in order to ensure that the programme remains relevant and inspirational for future generations,” IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies wrote in an e-mail.
Bill Briggs can be reached at 303-820-1720 or bbriggs@denverpost.com.
