USA on same side as Iran, Cuba and Russia on wrestling

The Associated Press | USATODAY

MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin's spokesman says Russia will do all it can to persuade the International Olympic Committee to keep wrestling in the Olympics.

According to Russian news reports, Dmitry Peskov says Russia will work with the IOC "at all possible levels" to argue against the move to drop wrestling.

The IOC's executive board voted to cut wrestling from the 2020 Olympics, angering Russia, whose wrestlers have won 77 gold medals since the Soviet times.

The IOC executive board will meet in May in St. Petersburg to consider the issue. The final decision will be made at the IOC general assembly in September in Buenos Aires.

It is the second day in the row the USA, another proponent of wrestling, has gained support from an unlikely ally.

Tuesday, it was the USA and Iran, on the sidelines of a Tehran tournament.

U.S. freestyle coach Zeke Jones, speaking to The Associated Press by phone from Tehran, said that officials from 10 of the world's top wrestling nations would meet Wednesday in Iran to discuss how to reverse the IOC's decision: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, the United States, Russia and Turkey will gather to discuss how to reverse the IOC's decision.

Jones said that those countries were chosen because they finished in the top 10 in the freestyle competition at the 2011 world championships, the last time team scores were held at a major international meet.

"We'll be standing arm-in-arm with Iran, and we'll be standing with Russia, as we will with lots of other countries," said Mitch Hull, national teams director for USA Wrestling, in an interview in Tehran with AP Television News before the World Cup Tournament.

"Those (countries) really do make a difference because politically we're not always on the same page, or politically with Russia. But in wrestling, there's no doubt that we are all together in this effort and we consider Iran one of our strongest allies in the sport of wrestling," Hull said.

Hull described them as "sport rivals, but they are friends in sport, too."

"We have great confidence that we can work with the Iranian wrestling federation."

Already, the fight to keep wrestling in the Olympics has brought the U.S. and Cuban federations into a possible alliance. But close cooperation between Iran and America would be an even more remarkable display of common cause with almost everything else driving them apart - led by an impasse over Tehran's nuclear program and Western sanctions that have upended the Iranian economy.