Major League Baseball (MLB) ruled out changing its season to allow top players to compete in the Olympics if the sport is readmitted to the Games, MLB commissioner Bud Selig said on Tuesday.
Baseball and softball have launched a joint bid to win back their spot on the Olympic program at the 2020 Games.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) wants the best players to compete and while Selig supports the bid, he said MLB will not interrupt its April-October season to make top professionals available.
“It just isn’t possible. I wish it was,” Selig told the Baseball Writers Association of America on Tuesday.
“I love the idea of baseball in the Olympics, I love the internationalization. We’ve told them [the IOC] that directly,” he said.
Baseball/softball was on the Olympic program from 1992 to 2008, but was dropped for last year’s London Games. The sports are now on a shortlist, along with wrestling and squash, for readmission in 2020.
Many of the top players from the National Basketball Association compete at the Olympics because it does not clash with the NBA season.
The National Hockey League takes a mid-season break to allow its players to appear at the Winter Olympics, but Selig said it was impractical for baseball because it would mean shutting down the season for more than three weeks just before the playoffs.
“People would think you’re crazy. You can’t do that,” Selig said.
The IOC is due to elect the winning sport at its session in Buenos Aires in September.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier