Going for gold

In most sports, the Olympic Games is the culmination of the journey; in boxing, it's usually just the beginning...

Jul 16, 2021

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Keeping the Olympic flame burning

THE LONG READ

It might have been delayed by a year thanks to coronavirus, there may not be any fans in attendance for the same reason, and the host city has just entered a state of emergency as the athletes have started to arrive. But, come hell or high water, the Olympics kicks off in earnest next week in Tokyo, Japan.

From the Games of the 32nd Olympiad, there is one thing of which we can be certain - new boxing stars will undoubtedly emerge, they always do. The business of boxing relies on the Olympic talent conveyor belt.

Boxing has been at the heart of all but three Summer Games across the entire history of the Olympics and is a constant throughout the event - with fights from the first full day of competition right through to the very last.

Growing up, my dad often regaled me with stories of him and his mates driving a banged up second-hand ambulance from London to Rome to watch Muhammed Ali (then an 18-year-old Cassius Clay) win gold at the 1960 Olympics. Less than four years later, he would become the heavyweight champion of the world, going on to become one of the most famous people to ever live. The production line hasn’t slowed since. An almost endless list of all-time great fighters have had their first real taste of stardom at the Games.

Obviously there is a difference between the two codes in planning for success, and some boxers fail to bridge the gap. The amateur points scoring system suits some fighters perfectly and others less so, and it can be a tough adjustment when entering the world of longer fights, self-promotion and big punching KO artists. Knockouts are rare in amateur fights, even more so in the Olympics, so it can be a real culture shock for a schooled amateur technician to face a headhunting trash talker.

Not all who find success during the summer Olympics go on to make it in the pro game, but there isn’t a better platform from which to launch a bid for the riches and glory available at the top end of the fight game.

The relationship between boxing and the Olympics is somewhat unique, due to the structure of the wider sport. While for the majority of athletes competing and succeeding at the Games is invariably the height of their sporting success and notoriety, for boxers it is a means to an end. A glorious one, but a means to an end nonetheless. It is fascinating to see how their careers then unfold as they navigate their way into the paid ranks, the Wild West open market of boxing without the regimented guidelines of the amateur boxing Olympic cycle.

Succeeding at the Games certainly propels a boxer forward in their career, offering up financial opportunities other young fighters could only dream of, but a storied Olympic career is clearly just one route to boxing greatness.

Some fighters don’t have the luxury of spending years in the lowly-paid amateur ranks, and instead jump into professional competition as a teenager (think Canelo, Julio Cesar Chavez) - but it is also true that, if you think of a major fighter in the sport, there is an excellent chance that they will have been involved in the Olympic boxing programme.

From George Foreman to Pernell Whitaker, Vladimir Klitschko to Andre Ward, Oleksandr Usyk to Vasyl Lomachenko, so many modern greats have parlayed the glory of winning gold at the Games into major success in the fight game.

For the managers and promoters as well, boxing at the Olympics offers up a glimpse into their future. As Kalle Sauerland sagely noted when launching Wasserman Boxing earlier this year: “With the Olympics, we have historically always gone shopping”.

The easiest marketing strategy for a fighter coming into the professional side of the sport is that of being the golden boy, or in more recent years golden girl. Winning the top prize at the Olympics usually means not only maximum exposure in the press and media before going pro, but also crossover audience potential - something which is often lacking for a sport like boxing. No fighter exemplifies this better in the modern era than Oscar De La Hoya. Winning gold at the 1992 Olympics provided a platform, along with a name for both his in-ring career and his promotional company.

‘The Golden Boy’ has his detractors - even more so since he became a promoter, and for his often-bizarre behaviour- but his Olympic success established him as a star in the sport, and he subsequently shirked no challenges in a glittering, and hugely lucrative, career as a fighter. Winning world titles in six weight classes and headlining 19 pay-per-view events on HBO, whilst also transcending the sport to become a genuine mainstream star, De La Hoya has to objectively go down as a true all-time great.

It was the story of his Olympic success, driven by the dedication that winning a gold medal was his late mother’s dying wish, that made it all possible.

Although he didn’t adopt the golden boy nickname, Anthony Joshua was very much positioned in the same manner after he emerged with the top prize from the super heavyweight London 2012 tournament. The Olympic stage has allowed him the opportunity to develop a hugely successful professional career, regularly selling out stadiums and claiming the majority of the genuine heavyweight world title belts available. AJ was such a hot ticket, thanks to his Olympic heroics, that he was headlining at the O2 Arena in his debut fight.

Since women’s boxing became an official Olympic event at London 2012, the top female fighters in the sport have also utilised their Games heroics to announce themselves to the world. Katie Taylor was long considered the greatest Irish athlete of her generation as she cleaned up in amateur competitions before winning lightweight gold in London, and Claressa Shields established herself and female boxing more into the mainstream with middleweight gold at both the 2012 (when she was just 17 years old) and 2016 Games. They have subsequently gone on to have major roles in reshaping the public perception of women’s boxing in the professional game as well.

Nicola Adams also contributed significantly towards shattering stereotypes as she swept to back-to-back flyweight gold medals in London and Beijing. Although her pro career was cut short due to injury and she perhaps turned over too late to have the chance of a huge impact in the paid ranks, her Olympic accomplishments succeeded in altering the general view of female fighting, especially with the British public.

Scoring is an issue in amateur boxing - of that, there is no doubt. It’s been a major problem for decades. Roy Jones ‘lost’ the gold medal light middleweight final on a ridiculous decision to the home South Korean fighter Park Si-hun at Seoul ‘88, and Gennady Golovkin has rightly claimed for years he was screwed out of a middleweight gold medal in the 2004 Athens event. In 2016, Joe Joyce was inexplicably defeated by Tony Yoka in the final of the super heavyweight tournament, despite seemingly doing more than enough to win handily. There are numerous other examples.

Floyd Mayweather is one of the most notorious cases of those who have had their big Olympic moment yanked away from them by errant scorecards. In 1996 in Atlanta, a 19-year-old Mayweather followed in the footsteps of his future rival De La Hoya by impressively carrying America’s hopes through the early stages of the competition. Eventually, though, he was left weeping after losing his semi-final bout to Serafim Todorov of Bulgaria in an extremely controversial fashion. Floyd won the fight that night, but he didn’t get the decision.

For the great fighters, suffering a dodgy decision defeat in an Olympics which had been the focus of their entire lives up to that point can actually be a net positive for their careers overall. For these boxers, not taking gold can light a fire that drives them to even greater success in the pro game. Mayweather used it as fuel not just to instigate his incredible rise in the pro ranks, but also to inform the business plan which saw him becoming the highest earner in the history of the sport. As he himself noted more than two decades later, losing that semi-final fight was one of the best things that ever happened to him…

“I’m glad that the fight went like it went...It made me work that much harder as a professional not to feel that same pain again”.

Golovkin, similarly, sees what at the time felt like his world ending as a blessing in hindsight - “If I won the Olympics maybe I would have been finished”, he noted many years later. Going pro two years after his Olympic defeat, he went on to be the king of the middleweight division for years, and the first fighter from Kazakhstan to become a worldwide boxing superstar.

General corruption is an unedifying, but sadly undeniable, part of boxing’s relationship with the Olympics.

Things have gotten so bad that there was a genuine concern at one stage that boxing would be chucked out of the Olympics prior to Tokyo 2020. Instead, the International Olympic Committee voted to remove the AIBA (the organisation which oversees international amateur boxing competitions) as the governing body of the sport for the Games, due to "issues in the areas of finance, governance, ethics and refereeing and judging" which presented “serious legal, financial and reputational risks to the IOC and the Olympic Movement”. Then-AIBA president Gafur Rakhimov was identified as a leading member of an international crime syndicate, the AIBA itself was on the verge of bankruptcy, and multiple clear examples of judging irregularities indicated deep-seated corruption. Heavy stuff, perhaps worse than many boxing insiders had feared.

Just like the ageless Manny Pacquiao, however, boxing at the Games manages to continue on, with an IOC-created task force ensuring delivery of the qualification events and the competition in Tokyo. I personally am not convinced at the recent rule change of professional boxers being allowed to enter the Olympics, something which the IOC has maintained for 2021, but the expected stream of big-name boxers from the paid ranks flooding Olympic qualifiers has not yet happened.

Olympic boxing can also provide fascinating story arcs, ones to which the muddled, unregulated business of boxing often isn’t able to deliver a satisfying conclusion. Lennox Lewis and Riddick Bowe contested the super heavyweight gold medal fight at the 1988 Games, and Lewis’s contested victory was an ideal launching pad for a storied professional heavyweight rivalry that never ended up happening.

Lewis and Bowe both found huge success in the pro ranks - especially Lennox, the last man to hold the title of undisputed heavyweight champion of the world - but facing each other in an epic series could have potentially been their career peak. Let’s hope boxing is able to avoid squandering future Olympic rivalries when outstanding talents turn over, although given the evidence of how often we don’t see the big fights materialise that might be wishful thinking.

Similarly, we are yet to see Joe Joyce and Tony Yoka rekindle their amateur rivalry, which has an in-built story of Olympic controversy. Perhaps we will, now they are both more established in the heavyweight division - Yoka’s side are intimating that the fight could be one they push for, although with Joyce highly-ranked by the WBO (only behind champion Anthony Joshua’s next challenger Oleksandr Usyk) maybe that isn’t the top priority of ‘The Juggernaut’ for the time being.

For one nation, what happens in each Olympic cycle will always be the top priority. Cuban fighters have a unique relationship with amateur boxing. With a ban on boxers turning professional, they are expected to dedicate their lives to success at international amateur tournaments on low levels of pay, before most become trainers or officials in the same programme. So while other countries are in a perpetual cycle of new, young talent joining their teams, the Cubans look to dominate for multiple events. Second only to the United States in the all-time boxing medal table at the Games, they have a well-funded and widespread national boxing training programme with the sole focus of success in the amateur side of the sport.

This has, of course, led to a number of high-profile defections over the years, with Cuban boxers abandoning their home country to make a break for the USA, lured by the bright lights and potential riches of the professional industry which they are barred from indulging in. Recent examples have included former world champions such as Guillermo Rigondeaux, Yuriorkis Gamboa and Erislandy Lara, and heavyweight contender Luis Ortiz.

Given that all of their prior life experience is Communist Cuba, however, they sometimes struggle to adjust to a ‘free’ society, meaning that on occasion they don’t achieve the level of success their immense talent would seem to dictate, few seem to regret their decision.

Cuban defectors are certainly not the only Olympic boxing success stories who can find it tough going in the pro game. Audley Harrison became a crossover star at the 2000 Sydney Games when he impressively became the first Brit to ever win the super heavyweight gold medal. Signing a broadcast deal with the BBC for big money and being hailed as the next Lennox Lewis, Audley was set up to dominate the heavyweight division for years to come.

Though he racked up the wins on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 2000s against limited opponents, Harrison later unravelled in bouts against journeymen, and ended his career by being wiped out in short order by the likes of David Price, David Haye and Deontay Wilder. His 2010 performance against Haye was deemed so poor that Sky Sports decided to shelve boxing pay-per-views at the time because of it. It’s fair to say that he never lived up to his perceived post-Olympic potential.

Audley’s Olympic legacy, however, remains, with the continued funding for amateur boxing in Britain we see to this day. His gold medal win and the ensuing fervour it created in the country, combined with then-17-year-old Amir Khan’s outstanding performance in the 2004 Games, ensured that cash would be safeguarded for years to come.

But what of those fighters who never seem to get past their Olympic moment in the sun? Serafim Todorov, the last man to hold a victory over Floyd Mayweather, could not have a more polar opposite existence to the man he defeated in the Atlanta 1996 event - while ‘Money’ flaunts his extreme wealth for all to see, Todorov lives on a 400 Euro per month pension. Todorov was offered big contracts and signing bonuses to become a professional in the States, but turned it down flat, due to loyalty to his country which he later did not feel was reciprocated. He later accepted an offer to change his allegiance to Turkey, but it soon fell apart and Todorov boxed infrequently after that. It was a sliding doors moment, one which so many amateur boxers find themselves in - when, how (and sometimes if) to go pro.

Boxing at the Olympics is one of the most fascinating events the sport has to offer, amateur or pro - giving us all a glimpse into the future of the fight game, presenting us with so many fascinating subplots in the process.

The next generation

So, who of the class of 2021 has the potential to star in Tokyo?

From what I have seen of him so far, Keyshawn Davis (lightweight) - representing the USA and having already turned pro because of the year-long delay of the event - looks like he could be headed to the very top of the sport, although to win gold in Tokyo he will need to overcome Cuba’s excellent Andy Cruz. If all goes as expected, they could compete in a classic final. Team GB is taking a large and exciting group out to the Games, with Pat McCormack (welterweight) and Lauren Price (middleweight) looking extremely impressive in the build-up, especially during the European qualifiers. Both are European champions, with Price also winning the top prize at the 2019 worlds, and enter as major gold medal contenders. Frazer Clarke (super heavyweight) has a great story, having been pipped for selection by Anthony Joshua in 2012 AND Joe Joyce in 2016, prompting him to almost turn pro, but he stuck at it and now arrives in Tokyo as team captain. Uzbekistan have emerged as a major force in Olympic boxing, winning more boxing medals than any other nation at Rio 2016, and they equal GB for the biggest team in Japan - with reigning world and Olympic champion Shakhobidin Zoirov (flyweight) keen to defend his crown, and Bakhodir Jalolov (super heavyweight) already 8-0 as a pro and the big favourite in the top weight category. At 31 years old, it seems unlikely that Cuban Julio César La Cruz (light heavyweight) will be defecting to the pro game any time soon, but he is still amongst the most exciting fighters in either code active today.

**Keyshawn Davis is a boxing superstar in the making** Credit: Getty

With so much talent, unexpected stars will inevitably emerge from the seventeen days of competition. Despite all the controversies and issues, it is an event that brings so much to the sport.

The Olympic boxing event runs from 24th July to 8th August.

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THE BOXING AGENDA

Quick thoughts on the boxing newswire…

Back in March, I covered the extraordinary $6 million offer handed out by Triller to win the purse bid for Teofimo Lopez’s mandatory defence of his unified lightweight world titles against George Kambosos Jr., as part of a piece looking at boxing’s chaos theory and the inherent disorder at the heart the sport. We are now in July, and you have to wonder if the fight (and those paydays for the fighters) will actually take place. After Lopez signed an improved deal with his home promoter Top Rank, he then tested positive for Covid just days before the original June date of the fight, scrapping the whole Triller pay-per-view event, which would have been just the third Fight Club show in company history. We are now at a point where Triller wants to put the fight in a stadium in Kambosos’ home of Sydney, Australia - perhaps seeing it as their only way to come close to making back their investment - in October, with team Lopez summarily stating this option is a no goer for them. They would apparently be happy to vacate the IBF title (which is the one Kambosos is mandatory for) and move on, cancelling the fight forever, with Lopez’s promoter Bob Arum prepared to support any legal requirements. It is a total mess and sounds like this one could end up in court, further stifling Lopez’s momentum and keeping one of the few potential fights Triller has on the slate from happening. You also have to sympathise with Kambosos, who fought his way to mandatory, won the lottery with a guaranteed $2 million+ due to the Triller purse bid and now appears to be in a perpetual training camp with no clear end in sight, all through no fault of his own…

So it appears that negotiations between team Canelo Alvarez and Caleb Plant’s representatives for an undisputed super middleweight world championship fight later this year are not going well, thanks to promotional politics and TV networks. PBC (who have Plant) appear to want Canelo to sign a multi-fight deal, and their TV partners want the bout on pay-per-view. Canelo isn’t keen on either of these things, and he has no reason to lock into a long deal when he is the biggest draw in the sport and calls the shots. Eddie Hearn (whose Matchroom Boxing works with Canelo) says that a decision will be made by the end of this week. Though he is taking some stick for ‘ducking’, I feel a bit for Plant - he is helpless in this situation, it would be a huge career-high payday and massive platform for him against the only other world champ in his division, but he has to dance to the PBC tune. Apparently Canelo could fight either Dmitry Bivol or Artur Beterbiev, perhaps at light heavyweight, instead. Now DAZN, which is the current broadcast home of Canelo, has now also reached out to Gennady Golovkin - the current IBF middleweight champ, who was last seen cleaning Kamil Szeremeta’s clock in December - to ascertain his interest in a trilogy fight, with GGG’s team stating he is “ready, willing and available”. The fact that he has a middleweight unification fight set up for New Year’s Eve in Japan with WBA middleweight champion Ryota Murata might be a stumbling block though. So after my in-depth look at the career of ‘Triple G’ recently included the conclusion that we are unlikely to see Canelo-Golovkin III, it now looks possible. If the Golovkin fight was to happen next - and it’s a big if - I would have mixed feelings about it. A victory for 39-year-old GGG seems unlikely and would be perhaps one of the truly great performances in modern boxing history, but I have no doubt he would be up for the challenge. The concern would be that he has lost enough of a step, up against possibly the world’s top fighter of 2021, to make this more uncomfortable viewing than the previous two entries for Golovkin fans. Given that the first two fights were close and controversial, however, the trilogy narrative IS set up beautifully…

Back in the heady days of May 2021, everyone was pretty convinced that Anthony Joshua vs Tyson Fury was finally, actually going to happen later this year. According to Eddie Hearn, it was perpetually a week or two away from being announced. Then the arbitration rule dropped, which designated that Fury was contractually obliged to defend his WBC heavyweight title against Deontay Wilder, so in turn, Joshua has been lining up a fight with Oleksandr Usyk, his mandatory challenger, with the WBO, IBF and WBA (Super) heavyweight belts on the line. Fury-Wilder III was set to go down next weekend, headlining a combined PBC and Top Rank heavyweight-only show with a strong undercard - which included Efe Ajagba vs Frank Sanchez and the rematch between Adam Kownacki and Robert Helenius. It has now been announced that the latter event is off due to Tyson and members of his team testing positive for Covid-19, though Eddie Hearn and others have been vocal in stating the cancellation was more due to poor ticket sales rather than Covid. This theory has a fair amount of validity looking at the ticket sites, so perhaps the general public wasn’t as intrigued by the card as yours truly. The AJ-Usyk announcement appears imminent for September, which is certainly one positive, and it’s been confirmed today that the Fury vs Wilder rematch has been rearranged for October. Whether that will actually happen or not, at this stage I wouldn’t wager the house on it. It’s honestly all a bit chaotic, and nobody is really taking responsibility for the mess which has unfolded over the last few months. Where this will leave the heavyweight division by the end of the year, it’s very difficult to predict - but it does feel like one of the biggest fights in the history of the sport (AJ-Fury) happening at all is now far from certain.

THE NEXT ROUND

A far-from-exhaustive rundown of upcoming boxing calendar highlights…

17th July 2021

Jermell Charlo vs Brian Castaño

Promoter: Premier Boxing Champions / TV: FITE TV pay-per-view (UK); Showtime (US)

An undisputed title fight that has gone a little bit under the radar, the winner of this one will become the WBC, IBF, WBA (Super), WBO and Ring Magazine junior middleweight champion of the world. This is a top-notch fight, featuring the legitimate champions and genuine top two of the division facing off for undisputed supremacy. Although Charlo has a loss on his record - a disputed points defeat to Tony Harrison in 2018 - he emphatically corrected it with a KO victory against the same opponent just a year later, and first won the WBC junior middleweight crown way back in 2016. Castaño has an aggressive, come-forward style which invariably makes for exciting fights, with the only slight blemish on his record being a 2019 split draw with Erislandy Lara, in a fight which I had him winning. He won the WBO junior middleweight title conclusively from Patrick Teixeira only a few months back in February and now heads straight into an undisputed fight. Charlo has to go in as the favourite, but Castaño is a good fighter and won’t be a pushover. This is as good as it gets at 154 pounds.

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24th July 2021

Joe Joyce vs Carlos Takam

Promoter: Frank Warren / TV: BT Sport (UK)

Poor Joe Joyce. Is there a fighter who has been mistreated by the system more over the past year? After delivering an outstanding performance in November in his high-profile victory over Daniel Dubois, being the clear underdog before the fight, he looked to be on the verge of a major fight against Oleksandr Usyk for the WBO interim heavyweight title. Aside from being a big event in its own right, he was under the impression that a win there would make him a top contender for the undisputed champion emerging from what we thought would be a summer Fury-Joshua supershow. Not only did the Usyk fight disappear as the Ukranian became the next in line for AJ, but then Dubois - the fighter Joe had beaten conclusively - even made his high-profile return before Joyce. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise, but rather than celebrating Joyce’s brilliant performance, there was far more discussion afforded to Dubois taking the count, whether Daniel ‘quit’ and how he would recover from his serious eye injury. Thankfully, Joyce takes centre stage here against Takam, in an event originally intended to be a lead-in just hours before Fury-Wilder III. Considering his highly-ranked status, potentially on the cusp of a world title shot, Takam is about the best possible opponent we could have expected for Joyce. Takam’s back-to-back stoppage defeats to Joshua and Derek Chisora in 2017 and 2018 respectively have been followed by four wins in a row against lesser opposition, and - though there might be due cause to surmise that 40-year-old Takam is past his best - this a good challenge for ‘The Juggernaut’.

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