South Korean officials and athletes were shocked Wednesday by the International Olympic Committee’s decision to drop wrestling from the 2020 Summer Games.

In a secret ballot, the IOC’s 15-member Executive Board voted wrestling off the Olympic program on Tuesday in Switzerland.

The surprise result removed one of the oldest Olympic sports that dates back to the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896.

South Korea lost one of its strongest sports at the Summer Games. The country has grabbed 11 gold medals and 35 medals in total in wrestling.

Wrestling also gave South Korea its first Olympic gold, as Yang Jung-mo claimed the men’s 62-kilogram division in freestyle at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

South Korean marathoner Sohn Kee-chung won the gold at the 1936 Berlin Games, but he competed under the Japanese flag while Korea was under colonial rule.

The IOC will replace wrestling with a new sport at the 2020 Olympics. The seven sports vying for the spot are: karate, roller sports, squash, climbing, wakeboarding, wushu and baseball-softball, whose international federations have merged into a single entity in hopes of strengthening their chances of returning to the Olympics.

The IOC Executive Board will recommend a sport for inclusion in St. Petersburg, Russia, in May, and the final decision will be reached at the IOC general meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in September.

The host city for the 2020 Summer Games will also be announced there.

Wrestling is actually eligible to compete with those sports, though it appears unlikely that the IOC will approve a sport it has only just dropped.

It was a day of mixed fortunes for South Korean sports. Taekwondo, the country’s traditional martial art, survived the latest international scrutiny and remained as one of the 25 “core sports.” It was hailed as a coup for South Korean sports diplomacy.

Jacques Rogge, president of the IOC, has previously said there would have to be “exceptional circumstances,” such as a drug scandal or corruption, for a core sport to be dropped from the Olympic program, meaning taekwondo should remain an Olympic sport for the foreseeable future. (Yonhap News)