By Norm Frauenheim-
Olympic boxing’s long slide into irrelevancy continued this week with an acronym’s decision to let pros fight amateurs for medals.
The outrage was predictable because, of course, it’s dangerous. Men shouldn’t be allowed to fight boys, although that’s been going on ever since the Cubans began their dominance of the medal stand’s top pedestal generations ago.
Olympic boxing has been an unfolding accident ever since Roy Jones Jr. got robbed of gold in a documented fix at the 1988 Seoul Games. In the wake of a scandal at an Olympics also marred by 100-meter dash winner Ben Johnson’s positive test for steroids, there were some cosmetic moves.
Olympic bureaucrats altered the scoring, replacing the cards with computers. But software is as corruptible as pen and paper. Since Seoul, the whiff of corruption has hung over Olympic boxing. There has even been speculation that Olympic movers-and shakers have thought about eliminating the sport altogether.
That would be tough to do, mostly because countries without the money for swimming pools and equestrian can always produce a boxer or two. Nevertheless, the sport has moved from the midway to the fringe, from prominence to obscurity. Sugar Ray Leonard won his gold at a Montreal venue near the gymnastics arena where Nadia Comaneci won her 1976 gold.
Twenty-eight years later, you had to leave the main Olympic park to find the boxing venue, a rundown building in rundown part of Athens, to see Andre Ward win in 2004, America’s last gold.
Four years later, the city was different, but boxing was as hard to find in Beijing as it was in Athens. It was if the Olympic establishment and the sponsoring networks wanted to keep it out of sight, if not out of mind. In 2008, a scandal erupted over how judges were assigned. There were allegations that some shadowy figure in an Eastern European country was offering money in an attempt to influence the assignment of favorable judges.
A news conference was called and held late at night, somewhere in between Michael Phelps’ eighth gold medal at the pool and Usain Bolt’s first at the track.
A couple of reporters, including this one, showed up. Stories were written, filed and ignored. Point is, nobody cares about Olympic boxing anymore. There’s outrage at AIBA’s decision to allow pros into the ring, starting this summer with the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, the Zika Games.
But it will subside, a little bit like the Olympic sport itself. AIBA’s decision pushes boxing closer to tragedy – a serious injury or fatality – than it has ever been. Then, it really will vanish. But will anybody really care?
