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Philippines, 12 Sep 2025 |
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Carlo Paalam Could Have Been Strong Bet for the Val Baker Award as Tokyo Games Best Boxer PhilBoxing.com Tue, 10 Aug 2021  Carlo Paalam. No Val Baker Award for the best boxer was given in the just concluded 2020 Tokyo Olympics. This is because the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suspended the International Boxing Association (Amateur) or AIBA, the organization usually conducting the Olympic boxing tournament and handing the award since 1936 Berlin and entrusted the holding of the boxing competitions to an ad hoc Committee headed by the host country. The Val Baker Trophy is presented every four years to the most "outstanding boxer" at the Olympic Games. In theory, the award goes to the top "pound for pound" boxer in the Olympics. The winner is selected by a committee of AIBA officials. The trophy is named after British boxer Val Barker who won the Amateur Boxing Association of England (ABA) heavyweight title in 1891, before becoming the secretary of the AIBA between 1926 and 1929. Had there been one, Carlo Paalam, despite losing the gold medal bout in the flyweight class against Galal Yafai of the UK, one of the top seeds in the tournament, would have been a strong bet for the Award. This is due to his near Cinderella run in the quadrennial competitions that saw him, a virtual obscure wild card entry advanced to the finals after ousting no less than the defending Olympic and world champion Shakhobidin Zoirov of Uzbekistan via injury-shortened technical 4-1 decision in the quarterfinals and the host's Ryomei Tanaka by a highly cerebral 5-0 points win in the semifinal. In the earlier rounds, Carlo also scored dominant points victory over Brendan Irvine of Ireland, a two time Olympian and one of the fancied names in the division in his very Olympic debut and Algerian Mohammed Flissi, both by 5-0 verdicts. Note that a few months before, Carlo was not even sure of making it to Tokyo. He lost in a box off for the last slot to Saken Bibossinov of Kazakhstan in the Asia Oceania pre Olympics qualifiers held earlier in Jordan, the very tournament that qualified teammate Eumir Felix Marcial who topped his own division. Carlo's last hope hinged on a final world qualifier then set for Paris in June and even then, nothing was certain. Eventually, the organizers decided to scrap the Paris tournament for lack of material time and just resort to the current boxers zonal rankings to finally determine the last fighters to qualify to Tokyo. Fortunately, Carlo made the grade. And as we have witnessed, Carlo made optimum use of the opportunity and proved to all and sundry that he truly was deserving and belonged with the elites. In the long history of Olympic boxing and the Val Baker Award, the trophy is not always given to the top winners or gold medalists of a certain division. In fact, the inaugural awardee, Louis Lauren of the USA in 1936 Berlin Olympics was just a bronze medalist in the flyweight class. Despite losing in the semifinal to the eventual gold medal winner, Lauren so impressed the organizers and the fans with his "scientific" style of boxing. The American was even commissioned for two months to conduct boxing clinics in Germany and other parts of Europe. The two other notable losers who won the Val Baker Award were 1968 Mexico Olympics featherweight bronze medalist Philip Wairunge of Kenya and 1988 Seoul Olympics junior middleweight silver medalist Roy Jones, Jr. of the USA. Most famous winners of the award included Nino Benvenutti from 1960 Rome, Teofilo Stevenson, 1972 Munich, Howard Davis, 1976 Montreal, Vasily Jirov, 1996 Atlanta and Vasily Lomachenko, 2008 Beijing. The AIBA started giving the award to both men's and women's boxing in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janiero, Brazil with Hasanboy Dusmatov and Claressa Shields as winners. Carlo could have been a strong bet in the rescheduled 2020 Tokyo. The author Teodoro Medina Reynoso is a veteran boxing radio talk show host living in the Philippines. He can be reached at teddyreynoso@yahoo.com and by phone 09215309477.  |
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