FIGHTING CHANCE
Canada’s Mandy Bujold heads to Rio intent on making her hard work pay off,
Being named to an Olympic team, especially when it’s the first time and something an athlete has been working towards for seven years, is a big deal. Really big.
But flyweight boxer Mandy Bujold didn’t make the short trek from Toronto, where she trains, to Montreal for her big moment in the spotlight. Why? “(I) didn’t want to miss any training to make it official,” she says.
To Bujold, making the team was just the first step and she’s been thinking about the next one for months already. And that’s delivering such a commanding performance in the ring in Rio her arm is the one that will be raised in victory.
Even Boxing Canada was pretty sure she’d say no when they invited her to the July 14 team announcement, which included Ariane Fortin of St-Nicholas, Que., and Toronto’s Arthur Biyarslanov.
“We were expecting that answer from Mandy,” Boxing Canada’s high performance director Daniel Trepanier says.
That’s both because of who Bujold is — someone who knows what she needs to be her best and is never afraid to speak her mind, even if it goes against the wishes of her federation — and lessons learned the hard way with Olympian Mary Spencer.
Heading into the 2012 London Games, it was Spencer who was the face of Canadian boxing. She was in a CoverGirl makeup campaign, a regular at Canadian Olympic Committee events and a television crew followed her around documenting her journey.
She went to London expected to win a gold medal in the debut of Olympic boxing for women and, instead, lost her first fight and was eliminated from the tournament.
Spencer isn’t boxing in Rio — Fortin, the 75-kg national champion who beat her, is — but her experience is still a cautionary tale for athletes and officials.
“(The COC) put a lot of emphasis on Mary Spencer in 2012 . . . we hadn’t had a contender for a medal in a while, it was something new for us,” Trepanier says, noting that the pressure proved to be too much for Spencer.
“Mandy has been in constant communication with a sport psychologist to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he says. “Now we’re making sure they have enough exposure but not too much.”
Even though they’re in different weight classes, Bujold’s dreams of boxing at the last Olympics were also caught up in the Spencer saga. Neither athlete qualified outright for London so it came down to getting in on a wild card and Boxing Canada put Spencer forward for that chance, not Bujold.
“2009 was when (female boxers) got accepted to the Olympics so that’s when it became my goal to go to the Olympics,” Bujold says.
Not getting there in 2012 was a huge disappointment but she didn’t quit, she doubled down. She left her home in Kitchener, Ont., and moved to Toronto to train with Adrian Teodorescu, who once coached heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis, to make sure her Olympic boxing dreams were never left to chance again.
“Some athletes are around for a four-year cycle, they qualify and that’s all good,” the 29-year-old Bujold says.
“But I didn’t qualify and had to work another four years and now that I’ve done it, I have proven that hard work does pay off.”
On the men’s side, boxing in Rio will look unlike any Olympic tournament since 1980, the last time men boxed without protective headgear. That controversial move, along with opening the door to professional boxers, will likely bring a lot of attention to the sport.
“There will be great boxing, I hope we won’t see too many injuries, but you never know without headgear and the cuts,” Trepanier says.
It’s an important Olympic tournament on the women’s side.
“The first one was a big buzz, now they have to prove they’re really competitive and they give a good show,” he says.
“You have to leave absolutely no question,” she says of fighting
On that front, Bujold should have no trouble.
“She’s an amazing athlete, she’s a complete package, physically gifted, technically and tactically really good and now (at) her age with all the experience she has, it’s all merging together,” he says.
“In boxing you have to be really tough and strong and stubborn and I think Mandy has all those qualities.”