“Without boxing, there are no Olympics.” (Yes there are)

Laszlo Papp was born in Budapest in 1926. Throughout his more than 20-year career as a boxer -always in the category that would now be equivalent to super welterweight- he built himself into a true legend. Winner of three gold medals at the post-war games between 1948 and 1956, he remained undefeated in thirteen Olympic matches. Professional since 1957, he set a record of 29 fights, with 27 wins and two draws. Undefeated among fans and among renters, in 1989 the World Boxing Council awarded him as the best amateur and professional of all time. Theirs is, perhaps, the most eloquent example of the sporting anomaly recorded in the relationship between boxing and Olympism.

To such an extent, the logic of the Hungarian communist regime of those years was to overlap with athletes with clearly professional skills within the amateur sphere that when Papp got a chance to fight for the world title in the 1960s, the regime withdrew his passport. Concluded matter. End of an extraordinary career.

Why call Papp’s Olympic path an anomaly? Because, without minimizing his enormous hierarchy, he was one of the many athletes from the so-called countries behind the Iron Curtain who competed against beginners as decidedly high-performance athletes. It didn’t just happen in boxing. Nor with the countries of Eastern Europe. Within the specialty, Cuba has been another eloquent example in this regard.

Of course, Papp would surely have won the same medals in a competitive context of equanimity. But his example serves as a trigger for other irregularities. Sports and bureaucracy.

Seoul. 1988. Final of the junior medium category. Local Park Si Hun won by points in a split decision over North American Roy Jones Jr. The failure was so unusual that Hun himself did not hesitate for a moment to lift his rival’s arm immediately after receiving the gold medal.

“The Korean guy knows very well who the winner was,” Hank Johnson, one of the North American team’s coaches, said, outraged. “Actually, we all know that Roy was the winner. Understand that you are not hurting countries. They’re hurting athletes. I would like to find the judges and ask them why they did this”, he concluded. The judges of the Soviet Union and Hungary gave Jones the winner by a whopping 4 points. Absolute superiority. Those from Uruguay, Morocco and Uganda signed a card with a slight advantage over the Korean; what’s more. The Ugandan scored a tie but I think the locals had hit more hits. One of the jurors was sanctioned for life. Another argument that gave the Korean victory “because Jones had been so superior that I was sorry that the local did not have any faults or consolation”.

This episode, considered by many to be the worst failure in the history of Olympic boxing, was only the most visible of the most scandalous specialty programs in the timeline of the games.

Several days earlier, Bulgarian Alexander Hristov and Korea’s Bjung Jong-Il faced off for the second round of the rooster category. New Zealand referee Walker sanctioned the home team with two penalty points for misuse of the head. The ruling was predictably favorable to Hristov. Not only did the Koreans coach jump into the ring to attack the referee, but his pupil sat in the ring in protest for... an hour and 7 minutes.

In order not to turn these lines into a tedious recounting of regrettable spectacles, it is worth taking a step back in time and, assuring them that there was almost no Olympic game in which there was no scandal surrounding boxing, dwell on the last memory. The coolest and, not for that reason, the least embarrassing.

Japan’s Ryomei Tanaka faces Colombian Yuberjen Martinez, who confirmed his superiority in every passage of a key fight: in this specialty, the quarter finals are decisive since, whoever overcomes them, secures the bronze medal.

The photos of the fight show the Colombian’s impacts deforming the local’s face. The video of the fight ends with an image of Martinez disoriented and Tanaka retiring exhausted in a wheelchair. The jurors decided that the Japanese would win 4-1.

Rafael Iznaga, the Colombian’s coach, said that “feelings are inexplicable. You can win and you can lose. But having done everything right and getting rid of the illusion is too frustrating. It is no coincidence that four of the five jurors have been expelled from the competition,” he said.

What happens in the ring and what is decided around it is nothing more than a correlation of what today institutionally affects the International Amateur Boxing Association.

In addition to the investigations into the settlement of combat and allegations of corruption, there is an institutional instability that led the Russian Umar Kremlev, head of IBA, to deepen these studies with the clear intention of reversing the scenario of disengagement with the IOC, which, until today, jeopardizes the continuity of the specialty in the Olympic program.

A few days ago, a demonstration took place in front of the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee, in Lausanne, under the slogan “Without boxing there are no Olympians”. The most prominent figure in the claim was, paradoxically, Roy Jones Jr. Perhaps the main victim of a system that never quite straightens itself out.