Yes, There Is Crying in Softball
Olympic de-listing clouds future for national team
By Mark Zeigler
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
USA Softball’s national B team is in Surrey, British Columbia, for the Canada Cup. On Thursday night, it played a college all-star team called Triple Crown Colorado and got an RBI single in the bottom of the seventh inning from Tiffany Haas to win 1-0 and finish pool play undefeated.
The players celebrated at home plate as Lauren Lappin scored the run. They posed for a photo with the other team. They reached over the fence and signed autographs for little girls.
“We were pretty excited, pretty pumped up, “pitcher Dana Sorensen said.
Then U.S. coach Carol Hutchins hastily summoned the players. She had something important to tell them. Had some bad news.
“The way Hutch was talking, the tears in her eyes, “said Sorensen, a Scripps Ranch High alum, “I thought something bad happened to somebody in the program.”
Actually, something bad happened to the program itself. Officials had just gotten word from the International Olympic Committee meetings in Singapore, where it was Friday morning. Softball was out of the Olympics, effective in 2012.
The IOC had rung ’em up.
Baseball was booted as well in an IOC vote that may be an even bigger shock than Wednesday’s selection of London over favored Paris to host the 2012 Summer Games. Baseball and softball were never popular sports among the European-dominated IOC, but they appeared to be safe in the political jockeying before the 100-odd delegates cast simple yes or no votes in Singapore for each of the Summer Games’ 28 sports.
Twenty-six got the majority required to stay. Baseball and softball did not, becoming the first sports cut from a Summer Games since polo after the 1936 Games.
The IOC decision could have serious repercussions at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, where the women’s team has been based since the softball field and practice complex were completed in 2000. Training center officials declined comment, forwarding all media requests to the U.S. Olympic Committee headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo.
The ouster of baseball and softball opened two spots for 2012, and after several more rounds of voting karate and squash emerged from a list of five candidates (beating out rugby, golf and roller sports). Then the IOC voted on those, and neither came close to the two-thirds margin necessary to be added to the 2012 program.
“They clearly voted for quality over quantity, “IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said.
London organizers tried to sound regretful, but secretly they had to be beaming. The IOC’s decision means they won’t have to build baseball and softball stadiums in Regents Park, an estimated savings of $90 million.
Three years ago, the IOC’s Program Commission recommended that baseball, softball and modern pentathlon be eliminated from the 2008 Games. The vote was ultimately tabled, and it took IOC President Jacques Rogge until this week to resurrect it.
Modern pentathlon is an archaic sport involving horseback riding, shooting, swimming, running and archery, and it has little global appeal. But it has one important thing on its side: It was invented by Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Games, and there may have been a bit of sympathy (and perhaps guilt) at work after Paris lost out two days earlier.
As for baseball, it was never able to gets its top pros to the Summer Games, and the recent doping revelations about some of its biggest stars certainly didn’t help, either. Nor did the current wave of anti-American sentiment and baseball’s status as America’s pastime.
And softball? The prevailing theory is that, viewed as baseball’s female equivalent, it got stapled to baseball and shoved in the wastebasket.
“We tried to keep our distance (from baseball), “said Don Porter, the head of the International Softball Federation based in Plant City, Fla. “But I think there’s still too many people who think we’re part of baseball. We’re absolutely not. We’re a separate sport. In some respects, I think that was part of the vote against us.”
Added Sorensen: “Anywhere you go, everybody hates Americans, especially with our involvement in the war in Iraq. Everybody else but America is pretty tired of seeing us winning so many medals in the Olympics. I’m sure people outside America had no problem taking away a sport that they figured America would win another gold medal in.”
The biggest losers, of course, are folks such as Sorensen, 23, and catcher Heather Scaglione, 21, a Rancho Bernardo High alum who is also playing on the U.S. team at the Canada Cup. It is officially called the national “elite “team, but in reality it is a B roster populated by the country’s most promising future Olympians.
At least until yesterday it was.
“It was really hard for us to hear, “Sorensen said, “because we’re the younger group. The other girls (on the full national team) have gone through an Olympics and they have the best shot at going in 2008. 2012 was potentially our chance to go, so for us the news was really hurtful.
“Sixteen dreams were taken away in one minute.”
What will happen to softball’s post-2008 USOC funding, its lifeblood, is uncertain under the new performance-based system that goes into full effect next year. Softball still will be played in the quadrennial Pan American Games, qualifying it for USOC aid and allowing it to use training centers, but the level of support could drop drastically.
In the four years leading to Athens, women’s softball received about $4 million from the USOC. Karate and squash, two Pan Am sports not in the Olympics, got about $500,000 each.
There are also the intangible benefits of having your sport attached to the five interlocking rings. Think Sports Illustrated is putting the U.S. softball team on its cover with the headline, “The Real Dream Team, “after Jennie Finch throws a no-hitter against Venezuela in the Pan Am Games?
Finch, in fact, graced the magazine’s cover again this week, giving more credence to the notion of a Sports Illustrated cover jinx. It hit newsstands Wednesday. Barely 24 hours later, her sport was cut from the Olympics.
More could go, too. A vote of the full IOC membership is required to eliminate an entire sport, but the IOC executive committee can slice off specific events or disciplines within a sport. Among those said to be in the crosshairs are track and field’s race walking, Greco-Roman wrestling and synchronized swimming.
IOC officials reiterated that baseball and softball can reapply for Olympic inclusion in four years, when the IOC picks a host for the 2016 Games. But it gets tougher now. To stay in, you only need 50 percent of the vote; to be added, you need two-thirds.
In the meantime, baseball and softball will take up residence in the graveyard of discontinued Olympic sports, alongside cricket, croquet, lacrosse, motor boating and tug of war.
“When (Hutchins) pulled us over, I thought someone died, “Scaglione said. “And in a way, a part of us did die.”
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