Allowing professional boxers to compete against amateurs in the Olympic Games is the craziest thing I’ve heard of in sports since the Seattle Seahawks decided to ignore Marshawn Lynch and throw a pass from the goal line in the waning seconds of Super Bowl XLIX.
It’s just an outrageously bad idea on many levels.
The Olympics have long been professional sports, and only a fool would believe otherwise, but in recent years, the trend has been to permit admitted professionals into the Games.
That’s fine when it’s basketball, even when an American team made up of 11 future Hall of Famers met Angola in the first round of the 1992 tournament in Barcelona, Spain.
And it will be fine this year when golf returns to the Olympic Games in August in Rio de Janeiro. There may be a few teams in which even the medalists struggle to break 75, but it won’t harm anything.
But putting professional boxers in the Olympics is courting disaster, made worse by the fact that AIBA, which runs boxing in the Olympics, has also decided to remove headgear from the boxers for these Games.
Though there has been no definitive study about the impact of headgear in reducing brain injuries in boxing, there are many in the sport who believe wearing head gear is more dangerous than not. While that can be debated, the point that the Association of Ringside Physicians made in an open letter to AIBA president Dr. Ching-Kuo Wu, cannot.
Under the signatures of chairman Dr. Raymond Monsell and president Dr. Larry Lovelace, the ARP cut right to the heart of the issue in its letter pleading with Wu (unsuccessfully, as it turns out) to change his mind on permitting professionals.
“Unlike Olympic competition involving team sports where professional athletes have been authorized to compete against amateur athletes, boxing and other combat sports constitute one-on-one competition; so that mismatches might well result in life-changing and life-ending injuries to the less training, less experienced, less prepared amateur boxer,” the letter read in part.
It’s one thing to get a kick out of Magic Johnson throwing an alley-oop to Michael Jordan for a slam dunk over the top of some helpless Angolan player. It’s quite another to see power-punching Gennady Golovkin, a 2004 silver medalist, pummeling an inexperienced 18-year-old from Nigeria.
Thankfully, it doesn’t appear many, if any, elite professionals are going to take the opportunity to compete in Rio. Already, Mike Martino, the executive director of USA Boxing, has said the U.S. team won’t consider pros.
So Floyd Mayweather can continue with the charade of preparing to box UFC star Conor McGregor instead of preparing to right one of the Games’ horrible wrongs by pursuing a gold medal this year.
Mayweather was robbed, in one of the worst decisions in Olympic boxing history (which is saying a mouthful, I know) in 1996 when he somehow lost a verdict to Serafim Todorov of Bulgaria.
Mayweather, among the greatest professional fighters ever, had to settle for a bronze instead of a gold that year because of that call.
The danger is that some pros, either now or in the future, will get the idea to somehow right that wrong and pursue the gold, either for themselves, for their country or both. Manny Pacquiao at least considered going to Rio this year, with the intent that he could win the first gold medal in the history of the Philippines.
Of course, not all amateurs are created equal, just like not all pros are the same, and there are some amateurs who would have and will in the future do well against the pros.
One of them is the great Vasyl Lomachenko, who won Olympic gold at featherweight in 2008 and won a second gold at lightweight in London in 2012. Lomachenko, who is 5-1 as a pro and already holds the WBO featherweight title, is one of the great amateurs of all-time.
He had an amateur record of 396-1 and no doubt would have handled himself well against any professional lightweight who attempted to derail his gold-medal run in 2012.
And Lomachenko, who fights Rocky Martinez in New York next week for the WBO junior lightweight belt, pointed out that there are actually some difficulties that would face pros were they to compete in the Olympics.
“Just because you are a professional fighter doesn’t mean you can beat the amateurs,” Lomachenko said Wednesday on a conference call to discuss his bout with Martinez. “It’s a different fight. We have three rounds and then you have to fight every day, five or six times. It is completely different preparation, but that doesn’t mean good professionals cannot beat good amateurs. Don’t forget the most important thing: you have to weigh-in every day before the bouts. You can’t do what [Orlando] Salido did [against me in a 2014 pro fight]. You can’t weigh-in at 126 then come out at 147. It’s not going to happen. Maybe for one bout, but then the next day you have to step in and get from 147 to 126?
“It is a completely different game and this is probably the main thing. You have to be in your weight class six days in a row.”
Pros aren’t used to weighing in every day and fighting without rehydrating a great deal. That could be dangerous for them.
The biggest thing is, there are far too many dangers for this to ever be a good idea.
There have been many horrible, probably even corrupt, decisions made in boxing, both professional and amateur.
This choice, to allow pros to compete in the Olympics, stands alone as the most ill-conceived, misguided decision of all of them.
