A recent poll has named the sport of Mixed Martial Arts as one of the ones that people wanted to see eventually absorbed into the games as a medal event. That thought has been gaining momentum, especially considering many of the combat sports that comprise the sport of MMA are in the games. Between judo, boxing, both forms of wrestling, tae kwon do and others you have the founding disciplines of a well rounded fighter already in the games. So it becomes an easy argument to make: why not in MMA in the Olympics? Why not have an amateur champion or two win gold and instantly become a bankable commodity in the professional world of MMA?
Because the MMA that winds up in the Olympics will not resemble MMA as we know it in any regard.
One of the things that people tend to forget when making the argument about MMA in the Olympics is that it’d have to be toned down and changed radically to make it reasonably safe to have a handful of fights in a short amount of time. Outside of “The Ultimate Fighter” this doesn’t happen because of injury issues; even on TUF there’s a limit to what fighters can do before medical personnel’s decisions and/or rational choices from fighters looking after their future take over. Considering 2012 has been injury plagued to begin with, as injuries have seemingly affected every card, and it would get even worse in a run up to the Olympics. Fighters don’t get through one fight injured, it seems, and trying to fight a handful of times in a couple weeks effectively isn’t realistic. So how would MMA get into the Olympics?
It would resemble MMA in the same way Olympic boxing resembles its counterpart; which is to say not at all.
Olympic boxing is about point scoring more than anything else; the way the sport is designed is to hit your opponent but not knock him out. It’s more about scoring points for some judges as opposed to the sport of boxing, which is about winning rounds and/or knocking opponents out. Things like body work and power punches go out and window as boxers go for more looping strikes that don’t have as much power, trying to connect as much as possible as opposed to as strongly as possible. It’s also fairly injury free considering the almost comically over-sized gloves and headgear, of course, and this is exactly where Olympic level MMA would go.
Throw in thick kickboxing shin pads as well as over-sized grappling gloves and headgear, and perhaps outlawing a handful of strikes; Olympic MMA would look nothing like what you’d see on any MMA card. In fact it’d probably look horrible and have any number of habits enforced in it that would get someone hurt badly in the pro game. There’s a reason why high level Olympic boxers don’t transition to the top of professional boxing en masse and we’d see something similar here between Olympic MMA and professional MMA.
On top of that we’d have a much different scoring system as well; people in their “Just Bleed” t-shirts tend to complain about certain fights in MMA derisively as “point fighting” regularly would be driven nuts by a system that most likely will resemble boxing in the same regard. MMA shares much more with boxing than any other combat sport and the same rules and regulations of Olympic boxing would be used as templates for Olympic MMA. While it makes watching an MMA fight a bit better in that the mouth-breathing types that shout the loudest would stay away it would be an entire sport differently in actuality.
MMA should be as far from the Olympics as possible; instead sports like Brazilian Jiu-jitsu need to be introduced instead. The beauty of the sport will be lost amongst the corruption of the IOC infecting it as well as the necessities of making it significantly less dangerous would cause it to not resemble the sport we love.
