Will boxing deliver in Rio?

The goal was to qualify at least six boxers for Rio but as Lady Luck frowned, the Philippines will send only two contenders to battle for Olympic honors this August. The final push to qualify four more fighters was a nightmare and now more than ever, it is imperative to reevaluate what went wrong.

At the 2000 Olympics, the Philippines sent four boxers to Sydney. Daniel Lerio, Arlan Lerio, Larry Semillano and Romeo Brin didn’t come home with a medal and only Arlan picked up a win so three others were blanked. The consolation was the country qualified four fighters.

At the 2004 Olympics, another four Filipino fighters went to Athens. Harry Tanamor, Violito Payla, Brin and Chris Camat never came close to bagging a medal. Payla and Brin scored wins but were eliminated in the Round of 16.

At the 2008 Olympics, only Tanamor qualified for Beijing and was wiped out in the first round. At the 2012 Olympics, Mark Anthony Barriga was the sole Filipino qualifier in London. He won his first match but lost the second on a hairline verdict to a Kazakh whose country is a major financial backer of AIBA.

So in the last four Olympics, no Filipino fighter has made it to the third round and only three of 10 reached the second. If boxing is supposed to deliver the first Olympic gold medal for the Philippines, the trend over the last 16 years is hardly promising. No Filipino fighter has even come close to the semifinals since 2000.

But every Filipino is still hanging on to the dream that someday, the Philippines will earn an Olympic gold in boxing. After all, the last four Philippine Olympic medals came from boxing with Anthony Villanueva’s silver in 1964, Leopoldo Serrantes’ bronze in 1988, Roel Velasco’s bronze in 1992 and Onyok Velasco’s silver in 1996. Overall, boxing has contributed five of the country’s nine Olympic medals, the first brought in by Cely Villanueva in 1932. It’s been 16 years since the Philippines has captured an Olympic medal and unless weightlifting and/or boxing come through, the drought will likely continue in Rio.

Lightflyweight boxer Rogen Ladon and lightweight boxer Charly Suarez will wear the Philippine colors in Rio. But how far can they go? There will be 22 contenders in the lightflyweight division and 28 in the lightweight class. Both divisions will feature highly-touted contenders from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, China, Russia and the US. It won’t be easy climbing the ladder but the task isn’t hopeless. Ladon and Suarez are now training at the Top Rank Gym in Las Vegas with ABAP head coach Pat Gaspi and consultant Nonito (Dodong) Donaire, Sr. Let’s hope Gaspi and Donaire are on the same page in camp.

Flyweight Nesthy Petecio was the first of the last four Olympic hopefuls to tumble and made her exit at the AIBA World Women’s Championships in Astana last month. She drew a bye in the first round then lost to Morocco’s Zohra Ez Zahraoui on a split decision. German judge Thomas Riebe saw it a shutout for the Filipina, 40-35, but Australian judge Moise Mbemap and Venezuelan judge Armando Villa scored it both, 38-all. Under AIBA rules, a judge with a tied scorecard must choose a winner even subjectively. Mbemap and Villa picked Ez Zahraoui despite Riebe’s shutout. Petecio was the only Filipina boxing bet for the Olympics which has only three weight divisions for women – flyweight, lightweight and middleweight.

If Petecio impressed Riebe, what could she have done to leave a similar impact on the other two judges? Surely, she should’ve been guided by her coaches. Winning was within reach but Petecio let it slip away.

Then, flyweight Ian Clark Bautista and welterweight Eumir Marcial followed suit at the AIBA World Olympic Qualifying Tournament in Baku now in progress. Like Petecio, they were bundled out in their first assignments. The disappointing departure should prompt the ABAP leadership to examine the deficiencies of the training system despite qualifying two boxers for Rio when only one represented the country in the last two Olympics.

Bautista lost a unanimous decision to Spanish naturalized citizen Jose Kelvin de la Nieve Linares while Marcial bowed to Germany’s Abbas Baraou on a split verdict. Marcial, 20, was a huge letdown considering he was the No. 1 seed in the competition. He needed only three wins to book a ticket to Rio and couldn’t even nail one.

What was particularly painful was the Baku tournament assembled the not-so-hot fighters in every division with the marquee names already qualified for Rio. In Marcial’s class, there were no fighters from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, China, Cuba and Thailand so the path was clear for him to make his move. Five would qualify from the lightflyweight and welterweight division each so the chances were better than average for Marcial or even Bautista to make it.

An Olympic welterweight qualifier is Thailand’s Sailom Adi whom Marcial defeated at the Asian Championships in Bangkok last year. If Adi was able to book a ticket, why not Marcial? In Bautista’s case, he was outfought in the first two rounds then came on strong in the third but Linares’ early cushion was too big to overcome. In Marcial’s case, he went toe-to-toe against Baraou which is how the German wanted it. Marcial was supposed to fight from a distance but the plan went out the window when the bell rang. Coaching was questionable in both fights.

Another hopeful who crashed out even before entering the ring was bantamweight Mario Fernandez, considered an Olympic shoo-in after winning golds at the 2013 and 2015 Southeast Asian Games. But two weeks before the Baku qualifiers, Fernandez was diagnosed with a cataract in his left eye and withdrew from contention. Petecio, Bautista, Marcial and Fernandez would’ve been the four to complete a six-man cast for boxing in Rio. It wasn’t meant to be.