Softball’s Elimination Leaves Players Shaken

For one of the few times in her life as a softball player, Lisa Fernandez feels like a failure.

The woman known as the Babe Ruth of her sport, a fierce pitcher who has won championships in college and at the Olympics, Fernandez was floored by this week’s news that softball had been voted out of the Games after 2008.

“All that hard work to put on a great show for the world,” she said Friday. “You think you are doing a great job.”

Fernandez, who dominated the softball action at the 2004 Athens Games, wasn’t the only one taken aback by developments during the last two days at a Singapore meeting of the International Olympic Committee.

The move to cut softball and baseball from the program at the 2012 London Games was followed by a surprising vote not to replace them with other sports that had been knocking on the door for years.

Rugby had been considered a likely candidate, given that IOC President Jacques Rogge once played the sport. Rogge also had lobbied for the inclusion of golf.

Both were rejected, as were squash, karate and roller sports.

These rapid-fire decisions have stirred questions about the direction of the Olympic movement, and left athletes from the jilted sports disheartened and wondering what went amiss.

Softball, added to the Olympic menu in 1996, had been put on notice that it could be in danger of elimination back in 2002 but had survived a vote at the IOC session in Mexico City that year.

Stars of the sport such as Fernandez and Cat Osterman, the college player of the year, said they thought they would survive again in this week’s vote.

“It was unbelievable,” Fernandez said.

The 34-year-old player, who has a line of Louisville Slugger bats named after her, spoke from her Long Beach home. Though four months pregnant with her first child, she has plans to play for the U.S. at the 2008 Beijing Games.

“I don’t think there’s a strong enough word to describe the shock,” she said. “I just feel we’ve been truly slighted.”

Kevin Wamsley, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies, said he was startled that the IOC, which has made an issue of promoting gender equity, would cut a women’s sport.

“That one doesn’t make sense,” said Wamsley, whose center is located in Canada at the University of Western Ontario. “Down the road, I think they are going to see this as a mistake.”

Experts were less surprised to see baseball ousted. Major league players don’t participate in the Olympics -- which goes against the Games’ desire to include the very best athletes -- and recent steroid scandals have hurt the sport’s image.

But Wamsley wondered if the European-dominated IOC had another, unspoken motivation.

“I think that these are pure rationalizations,” he said. “The truth is, the Europeans just aren’t interested in baseball. I think it’s that simple.”

Major League Baseball reacted angrily to the decision.

“Baseball is the national sport of a number of countries around the world and continues to grow in its global appeal,” Bob DuPuy, the league’s president and chief operating officer, said in a statement. “By deleting baseball from its Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee has made a mistake that will adversely affect millions of sports fans worldwide.”

No sport had been cut from the Olympics since 1936, when polo was dropped. In the 1950s, the IOC expressed concern over parity in various sports where a few nations dominated and all others were left far behind, but no action was taken.

More recently, in the 1990s, the committee began to worry about the size of the competition. The Summer Games are capped at 28 sports, 301 events and 10,500 athletes.

So, for any new sport added, one would have to be dropped.

In 2002, the IOC launched an evaluation of its program. In effect, each of the existing Olympic sports was asked to defend its position, while would-be sports were given a chance to argue for inclusion.

The study focused on numerous issues.

How many of the 202 Olympic nations play the sport? How many have won medals at it? The committee wanted to know about media coverage and ticket sales, the cost of building a facility for each sport at the host site. Have there been doping problems? Is the sport growing or declining in international popularity?

Wamsley suggests that the newer sports on the Olympic menu were most at risk if only because the Games have been so successful at promoting themselves through tradition.

“The IOC, for right or wrong, has mythologized its own origins in order to sell itself,” the scholar said. “They have mobilized this romantic history and popularized themselves around the world over the past 20 years. Everyone knows about the Olympics. No other cultural institution is even close.”

So the tiny and often overlooked sport of modern pentathlon, which came to a vote, escaped being cut despite some questionable numbers on its report.

The sport sold only 13,500 tickets at the 2004 Athens Games, where every medal was won by a European athlete. Modern pentathlon was the subject of 54 news articles during those Olympics.

By contrast, softball sold 30,500 tickets in Athens and the medals were divided among athletes from America, Asia and Oceania. The press wrote 150 articles about the sport.

Wamsley points out that the modern pentathlon was a favorite of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics.

“The IOC is still clinging to this association with the past,” Wamsley said.

This week’s decisions were made by way of secret ballots among committee members. On Friday, they sifted through potential replacements.

Speaking from the dais, Rogge assured his membership that golf’s top stars were keen to take part in the 2012 Games.

“I was very surprised to see golf go out,” said Irish IOC member Pat Hickey. “Amazed.”

After being nominated, squash and karate needed two-thirds approval from the full assembly. Neither came close.

As a result, the London Games will offer only 26 sports. That gives baseball and softball a chance to be readmitted for 2016.

The IOC will hold a vote on the matter in 2009.

Baseball does not seem to have much of a chance. As Pal Schmitt, an IOC member from Hungary, reiterated: “The doping and the stars.”

The prospects for softball seem brighter. If anything, the sport might need to distance itself from the men’s game.

“The obvious story is that [a majority of the members] tied the two together,” said IOC Vice President Jim Easton, of Van Nuys. “They don’t understand. There is that confusion.”

There is also the fear that U.S. domination -- no other country has won gold in the sport -- might have hurt softball’s chances.

At the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, an international official could not help worrying as he watched the U.S. play its way into the gold-medal game with eight consecutive shutout victories.

“You don’t want to take anything away from a team that excels like this, but it is important to us to see the rest of the world competitive,” Don Porter, president of the International Softball Federation said at the time.

That never made sense to Osterman, the University of Texas pitcher who was on the roster in Athens and figured to be an Olympic star in years to come.

“I don’t think one country’s dominance should decide whether it stays or not,” Osterman said. “Table tennis is dominated by the Asian countries and no one is talking about that.”

Osterman said she feels that Olympic officials acted too quickly.

“They’re taking out a sport that is up-and-coming,” she said. “We’ve only been in three Olympics. You’re basically taking it out before it has a chance to prove itself.”

With softball making perhaps its last appearance at the 2008 Beijing Games, Fernandez says she has mixed emotions about participating.

“The first thing that came to my head is that I’ve done it three times,” she said of winning the gold medal. “It’s going to be someone else’s only opportunity ever. Do I step aside and allow someone else the actual feeling of what it’s like to be an Olympian because there’s nothing like it?”

Then another thing came to mind.

“Heck no, I’m playing.”

For now, at least, one of the best players in the history of the game has plans to compete in Beijing if only because she has something to prove.

“I’m going to show the world what this game is all about and let them know what they’re missing.”

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Abrahamson reported from Singapore, Dillman and Wharton from Los Angeles.