The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Did boxing or our boxers stink in Rio?
IT took about as long as it took for Michael Conlan to unleash his thirty seconds of verbal right hooks directed at “the cheating bastards of the AIBA” and Bernard Dunne - back in the RTE studio to declare that “amateur boxing stinks” for Twitter to pretty much cannibalise itself.
And that’s always the high watermark of people’s opprobrium towards the ills of the world at any given moment.
Round about a quarter to four yesterday afternoon Belfast man Michael Conlan became the latest and last of Ireland’s boxing team at the Rio Olympics to be beaten in the ring, leaving the country with zero chance of winning a single boxing medal at the 2016 Games.
Following hot on the heels of Katie Taylor’s shock defeat to Mira Potkonen, Conlan’s controversial defeat on Tuesday to Russia’s Vladimir Nikitin was all a little too much to take.
For the uninitiated and / or uneducated in the rules of scoring in amateur boxing, it seems as if there is something more than a little shady going on with some of the scoring at the Riocentro Pavillion 6 Arena in Rio de Janeiro.
Certainly the experts felt both Taylor and Conlan had done enough in their respective bouts to win and earn themselves at least a bronze medal by advancing to a semi-final.
Even to the untrained spectator, the closed left eye of Taylor’s Finnish conqueror, and the blood streaming down Nikitin’s face would support the general view that the two Irish boxers in the red singlets were very unlucky to have lost out such tightly scored fights.
But here’s a question? Whatever about Taylor’s acute shock and disappointment on Monday and Conlan going off on one in his post-fight interview on Tuesday, have the rest of us any right to bemoan the boxer’s rotten luck in Rio?
How often have you berated a referee for awarding a free against your club or not awarding a penalty to your team?
How often have watched your Premier League team play and gloried in your man going down with minimal contact to win an easy free?
How often have you watched Munster or perhaps Connacht play these last few seasons and turned a blind eye when a knock-on or a forward pass has gone unpunished against an English or French club?
How hard did you make the case for James O’Donoghue deserving that penalty he won against Cork in last year’s drawn Munster Final in Killarney?
And then argued vehemently that Aidan O’Shea’s penalty award against Fermanagh in this year’s Qualifiers was the worst decision ever?
The point is that you win some and you lose some, and sport isn’t always fair. This observer isn’t qualified to say whether Taylor or Conlan or any of the rest of our boxers were hard done by in Rio by dodgy judges or unscrupulous scoring. And if either boxer this week was done out of a medal by anything other than careless adjudication, well, then that just comes back to what we said here a couple of weeks ago about the Olympic Games and elite sport: watch it, enjoy it even. But park your innocence at the door, pick up your cynicism and view it all through that prism.
If Taylor or Conlan or any other boxer or sports person has been victim of nefarious judging in Rio then the Olympics and professional sport is in a much darker place than even Russia’s state-sponsored doping programme has thrust it.
We’re playing devil’s advocate here a little, because I too have been that spectator and fan who has castigated an official for a bad decision or quietly condoned a poor decision that’s gone in my team’s favour.
All one can do is be philosophical about these things and believe they even themselves out over time. That’s from the spectators point of view. You give a little and you get a little. You simply, as it were, roll with the punches and take the win or take your beating.
Of course, that doesn’t work for Katie Taylor or Michael Conlan this week. They’ve invested too much to leave it at that, but unless you stop your opponent then boxing scores becomes arbitrary and subjective. There is no finishing line to cross first, no bar to scale, no goals to score.
It’s too soon to say whether the decision for Vladimir Nikitin was the right one or not, and we’ll probably never really know other than Bernard Dunne and Mick Dowling being adamant that it wasn’t while their Russian equivalents argue it was.
From what I’ve seen and read of this Olympics I haven’t heard a gymnast or a diver bemoaning a points decision going against them.
Maybe Dunne is right, that amateur boxing stinks, or maybe it’s karma biting back for Billy Walsh and Michael O’Reilly.
Or maybe four years on from London 2012 our boxers simply weren’t good enough and up for the fight.