Knocked out of the Olympic ring, boxing will suffer

If the provisional exclusion of boxing from the Los Angeles 2028 roster of Olympic sports fails to drive fear into the pigs feeding at the fistic trough, then nothing will.

The initial list, without boxing, weightlifting and modern pentathlon, has just been confirmed at the Winter Games in Beijing. Open boxing, or what was previously known as amateur boxing, has until 2023 to meet certain criteria to win back inclusion.  

The problem is that it’s as rotten as the professional game, which itself has slipped from a mainstream sport 30 years ago to the periphery.

Every now and then the paid game flickers on the world stage like a dying neon light when they put together a huge contest. 

But what would happen to professional boxing if the amateur leg were to be booted out of the Olympics?

The Games has played a major role as a pipeline for the professional sport, with Olympic medallists arriving on a built-in red carpet, their marketing already done.

Muhammad Ali, when he was still Cassius Clay, won the light-heavyweight gold at Rome 1960, Joe Frazier took heavyweight gold four years later and George Foreman the heavyweight gold in 1968.

American Pete Rademacher, who beat SA’s Daan Bekker en route to becoming the Olympic champion at Melbourne 1956, made his professional debut challenging Floyd Patterson for the world heavyweight title in 1957, but was knocked out in the sixth round.

More recently, Gennady Golovkin, Anthony Joshua, Oleksandr Usyk, Wladimir Klitschko, Lennox Lewis, Oscar De La Hoya, Andre Ward, Floyd Mayweather and Roy Jones junior all made Olympic podiums.

But amateur boxing has been vrot for a long time. In one of the most famous ring muggings, Jones got stiffed for the gold medal at Seoul 1988, but  the stench drifts back a lot further than that.

At Amsterdam 1928 SA was denied the chance of winning a third successive  Olympic gold in the bantamweight division after the successes of Clarence Walker in 1920 and Willie Smith in 1924.

Harry Isaacs outpointed John Daley of the US in the 1928 semifinals, but after he was announced as the winner American fans jeered the outcome and stormed the ringside area. As police tried to hold them back, officials inexplicably reversed the decision. Isaacs went on to take the bronze while an Italian beat Daley in the final.

Newspaper reports said there were plenty of other dubious decisions from the 1928 showpiece.

The pinnacle of amateur boxing has been the Olympics. They have their own world championships, but that doesn’t come close in prestige to the Games.

If boxing loses its Olympic status, the professionals will lose their richest feeding ground as well as a key cash injection from the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Furthermore, they will lose numbers — how many kids choose boxing because it’s an avenue to the Games?

Fewer skilled fighters will ultimately result in fewer fights.

Professional boxing won’t die if the Olympics pull the plug — there are fighters who made it to the top without amateur pedigree, like Rocky Marciano, Roberto Duran and most recently Canelo Alvarez.

But without the Olympics to reach new audiences, professional boxing will shrink. Those ageing neon lights will flicker less often. 

And we know this here in SA because we’ve already seen the devastating effect of a declining amateur sport on the professional arm, thanks to the incompetence and short-sightedness of administrators at the SA National Boxing Organisation and SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc).

In 2016, Sascoc got overly precious over selection criteria and refused to pick a couple of boxers who had qualified for Rio, and ahead of the Tokyo Games last year Sanabo failed to get it together to send a team to the African qualifying tournament. 

SA landed 19 Olympic boxing medals from 1920 until 1960, but since readmission in 1992 it has won nothing. The most any single fighter has achieved is winning one fight at a Games.

The Olympics statistics might paint a picture of simple non-performance by SA boxers, but the Commonwealth Games shows the decline more graphically.

In the three Commonwealth showpieces from 1998 to 2006 SA won six medals, but at the next three, from 2010 to 2018, SA managed just one.

SA has had no shortage of amateur boxers with wonderful raw talent, but in the absence of a functioning system and elite programmes to harness that, they’ve had nowhere to go except to the professional ranks where many fall short.

Boxing is a brutal sport and it increasingly has to justify its existence. One of its strongest arguments is that it offers a route out of poverty for many.

I feel for the fighters themselves, because the expulsion of boxing from the Olympics, if it happens, would make their tasks even tougher.

But I don’t feel a thing for the administrators who gorged like pigs, here or abroad. They deserve to drown in the trough. Failing that, hopefully they can remove their snouts long enough to do what they must to keep boxing in the Olympics.