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PREMATURE US CELEBRATIONS IN THE CONTROVERSIAL 1972 MEN’S FINAL

the inaugural women’s gold medal and went on to dominate the Olympic tournament until 1988, when the Americans took over.. In fact, the USA women are currently on an unbroken streak of five consecutive gold medals..

With the Americans boycotting the 1980 Moscow Games, the Soviets were expecting to wrap up their second men’s gold, only to be knocked out again in the semi-finals by the eventual champions Yugoslavia..The USSR were absent from LA 1984, where the USA cruised to victory, but at Seoul, four years later, the Soviets outplayed the Americans to win 82-76 in the semi, before beating theYugoslavs in the final..

Four years later, the world of Olympic basketball looked wholly different:the Soviet Union had ceased to exist;Yugoslavia,America’s other chief basketball competitor, was being riven by war; and the

IOC had decided to allow professionals to compete in all sports.. The NBA exploited the situation to the maximum, assembling the greatest pool of basketball talent ever to go to the Games.. Including

such stellar players as Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Charles Barkley, the so-called ‘Dream Team’ won

every game, by an average of 43..8 points..Their smallest margin of victory was in the final, in which they beat Croatia 117-85..

Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000 brought more of the same, but the opposition was getting stronger and more confident while the Americans became a little complacent, almost blowing it in the semi-finals against Lithuania in 2000. . Sydney was a warning not taken, and in Athens the Americans were narrowly beaten in the semi-finals by a fleet-footed Argentina team, led by NBA star Manu Ginóbili..The US team at Beijing 2008 was, termed, inevitably, the ‘Redeem Team’.. Equipped with leading lights Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, they duly swept to victory..

94 HOW TO WATCH THE OLYMPICS

Why Watch Boxing?

It isn’t a bad question. Why would you want to set-

tle down in a comfy chair to watch a pair of adults systematically knock seven bells out of each other? But to its fans, boxing is the very essence of sport, pitting man against man (or woman against woman) with no tools at their disposal but their fists and their wits

– a purity of proposition that gives boxing a fundamental honesty.. And if sport is about asserting dominance over other people, and people are in some sense their bodies, what could be more sporting than an activity that involves attacking and defending the body?

One thing Olympic level boxing emphatically is not is crude.. A thug wouldn’t last 11 seconds out there.. Boxing isn’t just about hitting people – it’s at least as important not to be hit..To achieve a winning balance requires immense skill, speed and guile, as well as boundless courage..The sport is not so much an exercise in savagery as a recognition and containment of it.. It takes the unpleasant primal urge to beat the daylights out of someone and turns it into a discipline.. Boxing is therefore best thought of as a Western martial art – or, as it is sometimes called, the ‘sweet science’..

For all its virtues, boxing has had a chequered history.. Fortunately for the Olympic watcher, most of the negatives have applied to the professional game. .Tainted by associations with organised crime and pitifully punch-drunk ex-fighters who didn’t know or weren’t told when to stop, it has fragmented into numerous and often meaningless ‘world championships’ in pursuit of cash..Amateur boxing – the kind practised at the Olympics – is different gravy.. Though not always squeaky clean, it is a great deal safer than the professional version, largely because the fighters wear head protectors and there are fewer rounds.. It is also refreshingly unbefuddled

– there is only one Olympic champion per weight division and competitors can’t duck out of facing opponents they don’t fancy..

The fact that the stakes are so high, both in terms of the prizes on offer and the risk of getting seriously hurt, makes Olympic boxing electrifyingly tense.. It can draw you in like no other sport, its visceral nature allowing you to ‘feel’ a smidgen of what the fighters are going through. .And there is a good chance of a legend

emerging.. Olympic boxing has consistently thrown up magnificent warriors,among them Sugar Ray Leonard,Joe Frazier and the incomparable Muhammad Ali..

A final excellent reason to watch the boxing in London is the introduction of an Olympic tournament for women.. Is this a triumphant achievement of equality or a demeaning folly? There’s only one way to form your own opinion …

The Story of Boxing

boxing goes way back. The sport was known to the

Ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, and made its first appearance at the ancient games in Olympia in 688bc, where contestants bound their hands with leather straps for protection and fought on until one of them surrendered or was rendered unable to continue.. The Romans came up with a typically dark variant of the sport, which used a metal studded glove known as a cestus.. Losing a fight was often fatal..

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, boxing disappeared from view in much of Europe..The carrying of arms became much more common in the absence of a powerfully policed state, and history suggests an inverse relationship between the popularity of boxing and the prevalence of weapons. . In a nutshell, you don’t want to start a public fight if everyone is armed to the teeth, and the authorities won’t like it either.. Nevertheless, various forms of folk boxing survived, some of them pretty hard-core. . In Inuit head punching, the combatants took it in turn to hit each other as hard as they could, with the receiver offering no defence whatsoever.. Russian fist fighting, first mentioned in the thirteenth century, also had a variant of this extreme form of the sport, as well as regular two-way boxing and organised team brawls..

The modern sport developed out of prize-fighting, which rose to prominence in England in the seventeenth century..The participants fought for money, with bare knuckles and minimal rules – there were no weight divisions or limits on the number or duration of rounds..The cash was often put up by aristocrats – the

first recorded bout (1681) involved the butler and the butcher of the 2nd Duke of Albemarle – but prize-fighting was also popular in less illustrious circles, where it was often the subject of huge wagers..

The Englishman Jack Broughton is credited with the introduction of boxing gloves, or ‘mufflers’ as he called them, although their use was initially restricted to training and exhibition matches.. Broughton’s Rules, published in London in 1743, aimed to bring some order to the chaos that characterised unregulated prize-fighting. . Hitting a man when he was down was forbidden, as was grasping an opponent below the waist. . A boxer who was floored was given 30 seconds to recover – if he failed to beat the count he lost the contest.. Canny fighters could exploit this rule by dropping to one knee when they felt the need for a breather, although this was not approved.. Manliness or ‘nobility’ was the central ideal of the emerging sport, both in Europe and the USA..‘The manly stand-up fight is surely far preferable,’ opined the American Spirit of the Times in August 1837, ‘to the insidious knife, the ruffianly gang system or the cowardly and brutal practice of biting, kicking or gouging now so prominent..’

The London Prize Ring Rules, published in 1838, brought further gentlemanliness to the proceedings, specifying a roped square ring and forbidding head-butting, biting and hitting below the belt. . But the event that catapulted boxing into the modern era was the publication, in 1867, of the Marquess of Queensberry code..The eponymous aristocrat, later responsible for the downfall of Oscar Wilde, didn’t actually write the famous Rules – he published them..They were penned in 1867 by a Cambridge University athlete called John Graham Chambers for the first amateur championship of the sport, held at Lillie Bridge in London..The twelve rules stipulated the wearing of gloves, introduced the 10 count for fallen boxers and established the system of three-minute rounds with one-minute rest periods..They form the basis of the laws that govern boxing today..

Initially designed for amateur boxing, the Queensbury Rules were eventually adopted by the professional game too, a process

hastened in England by an 1882 court ruling that declared bare knuckle fights to be criminal assaults, irrespective of the participants’ consent.. Spectators also became vulnerable to the charge of aiding and abetting..The subsequent almost universal adoption of gloves had far reaching effects..As the huge mitts could be used to block punches, the ‘forearms upright’ style of the bare knuckle boxer fell out of favour.. Bouts became longer and more tactical, with a greater emphasis on defence.. From the perspective of the punch receiver, gloves were a mixed blessing. .They diffused the impact but allowed the aggressor to punch harder as there was less risk of damaging the hand..

The organisers of the amateur championships at Lillie Bridge in 1867 had deliberately sought to exclude ‘riff-raff’ from the sport but the British Amateur Boxing Association, founded in 1880, was happy to allow blue collar workers to compete.. It also did not bar boxers on the grounds of race..The establishment of the ABA was a crucial moment in a battle for the soul of the sport between the upper and working classes..This was to be emphatically won by the latter but the process took much longer in the USA than in Britain..Wealthy club men controlled the amateur sport in America until the Chicago Tribune started the Golden Gloves tourna- ment in 1926..

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were characterised by a widening split between the amateur and professional codes. .The former featured shorter rounds and an emphasis on sparring (the demonstration of skill) rather than fighting (continuing to the point of exhaustion or knock-out).. Many now see amateur boxing as the perfect grounding for the huge payday that the professional sport can be..

The spread of Queensbury Rules boxing was gradual – France, in the years leading up to the First World War, was the first nation other than Britain, Ireland and the United States to take to the sport in a big way – but ultimately comprehensive..The first global body

for the amateur boxing,the Fédération Internationale de Boxe

Olympique founded in Paris in 1920,had only five member nations

– England, France, Brazil, Belgium and the Netherlands – but by the

time the Amateur International Boxing Association (AIBA)

THE AFghan Women’S BOXING TEAM TRAINING FOR LONDON 2012

came into existence in London in 1946, the number had grown to

25. The first World Amateur Boxing Championships were held

in 1974..The USA and to a lesser extent Great Britain and Ireland have continued to be major forces in the amateur sport but they have been joined by the likes of Cuba and the ex-Warsaw pact nations, with boxers from Latin America and the Far East doing particularly well in the lighter divisions..

Women’s Boxing

Astonishingly, given that the event is only just now

about to make its Olympic debut, women’s boxing was a demonstration sport at the St Louis Games in 1904..The competitors look like extras from Upstairs Downstairs in their knickerbockers but they could doubtless pack a punch..

And by that stage, women’s boxing was already almost two centuries old..The earliest record of an all-female bout dates from 1722, when Elizabeth Wilkinson defeated Martha Jones at an inn near Oxford Circus in London.. By the second half of the nineteenth century, women’s prize-fighting was well enough established for

it to be banned by law in several European nations and American states.. In Britain, the sport became illegal in 1880.. It never disappeared entirely, however..

In 1954, a fight involving Barbara Buttrick was broadcast on American national television, but the real breakthrough in the women’s sport came in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of legal challenges to the bans in operation in many countries.. It took still longer for women’s boxing to be sanctioned by the sport’s governing bodies.. In 1996, the British Amateur Boxing Association voted to allow women to fight under its auspices and five years later the first AIBA World Championships were held in Scranton, USA..

Game On: Boxing Basics

Olympic boxing is a simple sport at heart: the fighter

who lands the most scoring punches wins..Alternatively, a bout may be won by way of knock-out, in which a floored opponent fails to get up from the canvas before the referee has counted to ten, or via disqualification or withdrawal.. Punches below the belt or to the back are forbidden, as are holding, wrestling and tripping..To count, a blow must be landed with the white portion of the glove, which denotes the knuckles and the first bone of the fingers. .Thumbs should rest on the upper joints of the next two fingers..

The Ring and the Seconds

Boxers fight in an elevated ring – 20 ft square, with

a padded post in each corner..The edge of the ring is defined by a ‘fence’ made of four ropes. . Men fight three 3-minute rounds; women do four bursts of 2-minutes..There is a rest period of sixty seconds between each round..

Each boxer is allowed two assistants, known as seconds.. Both are allowed to mount the apron of the ring and one is allowed to enter the ring between rounds..Their jobs include advising and encouraging their boxer, towelling them dry of sweat between rounds, attending to minor injuries and, if necessary, withdrawing them from the fight by throwing in a towel..

Weight Divisions

There used to be just eight weight divisions in boxing but

at the Olympics the figure has risen as high as twelve.. In London there will be ten for men (from Light-flyweight at 46–49kg through to Super Heavyweight at 91kg plus), and three for women..

Competitors are required to attend a general weigh-in at the start of the tournament, at which boxers must register weights within the parameters of the divisions they are entered in..They are also subject to a weigh-in on the morning of every day they are fighting..Any boxer who fails to make the necessary weight is eliminated from the competition..

Ways of winning

The classic means to win a bout is a knock-out, when

a fallen boxer fails to get back on his feet within a count of 10.. Boxers can also win through the retirement of their opponent, indicated by their second literally ‘throwing in the towel’ into the ring, or by the referee stopping a contest and eliminating a contestant.. Most commonly, though, bouts are won on points.. If both boxers are still standing at the end of a bout, the one who has accumulated the most points (registered the most valid punches) is declared the winner..

A referee can stop a contest for a number of reasons, including: boxer outclassed (where the referee deems one boxer to be taking excessive punishment); head blows (where a fighter is unable to defend themself after receiving one or more blows to the head); or disqualification.. Referees can also issue a warning,for serious or persistent fouls.. If a boxer is issued with a warning, two points are awarded to the opponent..Three warnings and you’re out..

Scoring

All clean hits to the body or side or front of the

head score 1 point. . For a hit to be valid under the old scoring system, which applied to every Olympics between 1992 and 2008, at least three of the five ringside judges had to register it within a second of the punch being landed by pushing an electronic button..This system was widely disliked because judges frequently