Wrestling, an Olympic sport since the first Games in ancient Greece, looks set to be dropped, after the International Olympic Committee on Tuesday voted to remove it from the program for 2020.

The decision, taken by the 15 members of the IOC executive board in Lausanne, Switzerland, leaves the sport grappling against seven other disciplines for inclusion at the Games, the location of which will be decided later this year.

"It's a real shock. Wrestling was not on the radar," an IOC source told AFP.

"It was a very close vote between wrestling and modern pentathlon, maybe one or two votes separating them. The trouble was while modern pentathlon and taekwondo did effective lobbying, wrestling thought they were safe and did none at all."

The loss of wrestling, which will remain on the program for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, sees the likely disappearance of one of the few sports that survived from the ancient Games to those founded in the modern era by Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

It first appeared in 708 BC and has only ever not appeared at an Olympic Games in 1900.

The sport still has a slim chance of regaining its berth as all IOC members at the body's congress vote on the decision in Buenos Aires in September.