The World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC) and the ASA/USA Softball welcomed an announcement today by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Executive Board to support the inclusion of softball and baseball among a new sports package for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Their proposal was permitted under the IOC’s Olympic Agenda 2020 initiative, which gives host cities the option of suggesting new sports and events for inclusion in their edition of the Games.
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The IOC budget for the pre-Olympic testing programme has been doubled.
“An Olympic Summit will evaluate and review the entire doping programme and measures being taken for the Olympic Games Rio 2016”.
The IOC said that discussions are still underway with Major League Baseball to determine whether players from that North Amercian professional league will be allowed to play in the tournament which would cause disruptions with the regularly scheduled season play. How those sports will run in Tokyo, in terms of what disciplines remain medal events, will not be settled by the International Olympic Committee executive board until mid-next year.
Special focus will be put on countries where the testing programme is non-compliant – Kenya, Russia and Mexico.
A Turkish boxer has been provisionally suspended after his doping sample from the 2012 London Olympics came back positive in retesting.
International Surfing Association (ISA) President, Fernando Aguerre, said “this is a wonderful moment for our sport and for the global Surfing family”.
The board said: “We are taking further decisive action to protect the clean athletes at the Olympic Games 2016”.
Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee said last Friday said that 23 athletes from five sports and six countries had positive findings in re-tests with improved techniques on 265 samples from the London Games.
Meeting at its Lausanne, Switzerland headquarters from Wednesday to Friday, the IOC’s executive board will receive a briefing on the re-testing campaign and from WADA chief Craig Reedie on the main findings of the Russian Federation probe.
The IOC has retested stored samples from London and the 2008 Beijing Games, targeting athletes who could compete in this year’s Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
The package will boost the number of athletes at the Games by 474 and gold medals by 18, with the number of teams in each sport equal between men and women.
Karate, another sport with historic ties to Japan, has been proposed for eight events: two in the Kata discipline, with 20 athletes across the men’s and women’s events, and six in the Kumite discipline, which would feature a total of 60 athletes, 30 in each gender.
However, the nomination of new Olympic sports has become something of a sideshow in Tokyo after several damaging scandals.
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The added sports would not take places away from athletes in existing Olympic sports, it said.
