Chechen Wolf spars with stress, moves on
Lone Canadian male victorious
The Canadian men’s boxing team might be small, but it’s feisty and it’s one other thing after its first fight: Undefeated.
Arthur Biyarslanov, the 21-yearold light welterweight from Toronto by way of Azerbaijan and Chechnya, is also the only member of the Canadian men’s team. He opened his Olympic tournament Thursday with an unanimous decision over Jordan’s Obada Al-Kasbeh and now moves on to the round of 16 in the tough 64-kilogram division, where he’ll meet German Artem Harutyunyan Sunday.
“I wasn’t worried about him,” Canadian team manager Daniel Trepanier said of Biyarslanov, whose nickname is the Chechen Wolf. “But there’s Olympic stress and you never know who’s going to manage it.
“Arthur did a good job. He’s a cool kid, but he told me after the fight he was feeling the stress in his legs. He’s got his first fight under his belt, so this is going to help.”
In the Olympic’s new professional scoring system, Biyarslanov won all three rounds according to the three judges. Trepanier said his fighter got a little “cocky” in the third round and got caught a couple of times by the Jordanian. But the Canadian never lost control of the bout.
“For sure, he felt the pressure,” Trepanier said. “He was the first Canadian to fight and he wanted to win. He also knows he can make a name for himself in this tournament.”
Next up for Canada is Mandy Bujold of Kitchener, Ont., who fights Yodgoroy Mirzaeva from Uzbekistan Friday in the flyweight class. Quebec City’s Ariane Fortin, the most experienced fighter on the Canadian team and a bronze medallist at the 2014 world championships, fights Dariga Shakimova, a 38-year-old Kazakh, Sunday in the middleweight class.
Women’s boxing made its Olympic debut in 2012, but four years later in Rio the sweet science is sporting a new look of a different kind.
In the men’s competition, fighters aren’t wearing headgear for the first time since 1984, a decision made by AIBA, amateur boxing ’s ruling body. Why? For safety reasons. According to a study conducted by AIBA, the protective gear did little to absorb punches to the head and had little impact on the number of concussions in amateur boxing.