MEXICO CITY -- The head of modern pentathlon, one of the oldest Olympic sports, said on Monday that the IOC would be voting against its "soul" if it decided to throw the sport out of the Summer Games this week.

Speaking as International Olympic Committee (IOC) members started to gather for a meeting where they could scrap three sports from the Games for the first time since 1936, Klaus Schormann said he had received a lot of support in his campaign to save modern pentathlon, introduced into the Games in 1912.

The sport's Olympic future is under threat together with baseball and softball as IOC president Jacques Rogge looks to scale down the Games after decades of expansionism under his predecessor Juan Antonio Samaranch.

"I have talked to more than 80 IOC members and they have been very supportive. They say the sport is the soul of the Olympic movement. It is part of our moment and they support that," the International Modern Pentathlon Federation (UIPM) president said in an interview.

"I am confident it will stay. But I know that there are always a lot of positive things said before any vote and the result can look different. I have to be realistic."

Since his election as president last year, Rogge, concerned that the Summer Olympics are getting too big and expensive to organise, has pledged to try to cut the size of the Games. For the first time since 1936, an IOC session of all members opening on Wednesday will discuss proposals to chop sports from the programme.

An IOC report published in August said baseball and softball were very popular in certain countries but said the popularity was not reflected throughout entire regions or continents. It said there was a lack of global participation by nations and athletes in modern pentathlon because it was expensive to practise.

Money is very much at the heart of these proposals since it costs host cities a great deal of money to build baseball and softball stadiums which can be difficult to use for other sports afterwards.

Germany's Schormann, who successfully fended off another proposal to scrap his sport in 1997 when it was raised in a newspaper interview by Samaranch, dismissed the notion that his sport was not popular worldwide.

"That is just wrong. Modern pentathlon is active in 94 countries," he said. "It is not expensive. It is in the middle of the range of sports (in financial terms)."

The programme for the 2004 Athens Olympics will not be changed regardless of any decision this week.

There had been suggestions that the session would not have the right to vote on changing the programme for the 2008 Beijing Games because of the wording of the Olympic Charter and that any changes could only come into affect at the 2012 Games, the venue of which will be decided in 2005.

But IOC director general Francois Carrard said the legal aspects of a change for 2008 had been checked with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), an expert body on sports law.

Carrard told a news conference on Monday: "The session has the authority to take whatever decision it wants. It can vote for 2008."