Amateur boss faces knockout
Jon Swi
The attempted ousting of Wu Ching-kuo, the Taiwanese chief of amateur boxing’s governing body Aiba, may have been halted temporarily amid a deluge of legalistic red tape. But the palace coup gives strong pointers to the way the Olympic sport is endeavouring to realign itself.
At root, there are any number of anomalies which have worked against amateur boxing, not least of which has been the internationally growing call to scrap boxing and strong anecdotal evidence that it was Muhammad Ali’s 100 wins and five losses as an amateur that predated his 61 professional fights which triggered the onset of Parkinson’s disease.
Wu’s determination to bring the amateur and professional codes closer together might still ultimately be his undoing.
Two separate – yet interlinked amateur rules – are under scrutiny. The first entails the wearing of headguards. Headguards were first introduced for the Los Angeles Olympics in 1992 but in 2013, this was scrapped and at the Rio Olympics, elite senior men boxed bareheaded, though women and juniors continue to wear protection.
There is a strong feeling – running parallel to introducing age limits, which would stop teenagers facing veterans some two decades older – that the headguards should be reintroduced. Remember Ali?
But by far the biggest point of friction has been the scoring system. First introduced at the Barcelona Games in 1992, it has entailed a system of counting scoring punches. Three referees watch for what they deem scoring punches and if two of them hit the button in front of them simultaneously, a point is registered. The punch-counting system, which underwent multiple tweaks and changes over a quarter-century, was widely loathed.
It led to a number of anomalies; officials worrying more about job security than job performance or even outright corruption.
Such, it is argued, was the case when the gold medal at the 1988 Olympics was awarded to South Korea’s Park Si-hun after he was comprehensively thrashed by American Roy Jones Jnr.
The plan favoured now is to switch to four judges and the 10-point must system used by the professionals, where a bout is evaluated round by round, rather than punch for punch.
Whatever the final decision is, there must – and will – be changes.