The challenges of amateur boxing

Amateur boxing is at a crossroads. Internationally, it has been bathed in controversy for so long, correcting the past seems harder and harder. And with an ultimatum due from the International Olympic Committee soon, it has many traditional obstacles to overcome.

The amateurs are just a stepping stone. Unlike many other sports that do not have professional counterparts, amateur boxing is the lesser-known half-brother to the pro version. For many aspiring boxers, the amateurs are just a training ground, a necessary evil that they have to go through. It’s like going to college for aspiring basketball players in the Philippines. They use it to pad their credentials, and get it over with as quickly as possible. This is the reason why more and more boxers tend to turn pro earlier to get a paycheck, and once-glorious tournaments like the Golden Gloves have lost some of their shine. For the longest time, spectators saw each fight become a generic tussle between a boxer in red and one in blue, whose faces you couldn’t even see.

Non-Olympic tournaments are obscure. For Filipino audiences, amateur boxing usually comes up only during the Olympics, Asian Games and SEA Games. Other than that, even the most prestigious events like the World Championships aren’t covered by mainstream media. If it wasn’t reported that the country skipped this years Worlds, many people wouldn’t even know that it pushed through. What more of competitions held in remote European countries?

Pros won’t compete in amateur tournaments. In a bid to attract more fans, AIBA belatedly opened competition to professionals. But firstly, pros don’t like being judged by amateurs, and the format is just too strenuous. They are weighed every day, meaning they would have to fight in higher weight classes, and the fights are shorter. Most of all, there is no purse to fight for. It’s like asking someone with a doctorate to go back to high school.

Cultures are too different. You probably haven’t heard of Teofilo Stevenson. He was a Cuban heavyweight who is one of only two athletes to win three gold medals in boxing. He would have probably defeated Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Joe Frazier and Ken Norton in the golden age of heavyweights. But Stevenson never turned pro, because he was Cuban, and didn’t believe in Western commercialism. Time was when Cuba and the US were the only countries that fielded complete boxing teams to the Olympic Games. Communist countries and many European nations have a very strong culture of amateurism, it almost seems unfair to other countries that don’t.

The IOC Can’t Fix AIBA. AIBA was so bad for so long, it’s been 25 years since Onyok Velasco was cheated out of Olympic gold in Atlanta. It took the International Olympic Committee taking them out of Tokyo and a third-party investigation to pressure them into making changes. They can’t go back and rewrite history, but we hope that they can implement reforms to clean up their reputation. The IOC cannot meddle with their internal affairs. Only they can fix their own problems.