Watch this video and take a guess who won the round AND the match. (No using context clues! ;))
Pretty blatant shenanigans? All on its own, it would be - even if there hadn’t already been a strong indication almost a year ago that the fix was in. Taking that into consideration, you have to wonder WTF they were thinking!?
The good news is that officials have already reversed the decision and awarded the bout to the Japanese fighter. The bad news is that, whenever you think boxing couldn’t possibly sink any lower, it always does.
Boxing should have been thrown out of the Olympics decades ago. The Frank Tate/Shawn O’Sullivan bout at the 1984 Games was a pretty obvious throw and that was 28 years ago.
It’s a blight on the Games. It has to be thrown out at once.
Hopefully this will be enough to finally get boxing kicked out of the Olympics. There already are enough combat sports, and the others don’t have nearly the problems that boxing does.
That is an excellent suggestion. It doesn’t represent the sport of boxing anymore even with fair judging. You don’t see Olympic champions dominating professional boxing in the way they once did. The relationship between the ‘touch boxing’ of the Olympics and the real sport are lost. Perhaps the traditional sport is too violent and dangerous for amateur athletics in the modern world, but that is another reason to remove, not present a watered down version with incompetent and corrupt judging.
Good lord, it makes the judges in professional boxing seem competent and honest.
For the judges, scoring is very technical and not subjective at all (in the Olympics). Without having seen the first two rounds, it is hard to say that they made a bad call. Even in the third, with the amount of time the Azirbaijani boxer spent on his knees and wrapped up with the Japanese fighter’s ankles, the Japanes fighter wasn’t scoring many points.
The ref should have been taken directly to the bus station with a ticket home. Box up the stuff in hotel room and send it to him by Azerbaijan post.
What you said is true, and I haven’t seen the complete fight or round, either. There are no points awarded (or subtracted) for knockdowns, and from the accounts I’ve heard, the Azerbaijani fighter was actually winning the first two rounds, and had even knocked down the Japanese fighter twice.
But the Japanese fighter was on a hell of a comeback rally in the third round, and the Azerbaijani fighter even had two points deducted in that round - yet the judges *still *scored him as winning that round! (Never mind that the ref should have stopped the fight before the judges even entered into the equation.)
But even if you presume the judges scored the whole fight fairly and accurately according to the rules, it’s still not only an indictment of the ref - it’s an indictment of the laughably bad rules, format, and/or scoring system that would allow such a pathetic display to be declared a victory.
I’m not sure you can blame the judges here - the Azerbaijan boxer was well ahead going into the last round, the judges did in fact give the round to the Japanese fighter, and there are no extra points for a knockdown. The blame is with the referee.
This one still doesn’t sink to the low of the Roy Jones fight at the '88 Olympics. It was absolutely stunning when I saw the decision (taped, but as I recall, when I saw it, I didn’t yet know the outcome). Jones beat the crap out of the South Korean for 3 rounds. It was disgraceful.
Agreed - I don’t think there will ever be a boxing decision as bad as that Roy Jones Jnr fight - the worst hometown decision of all time (and GB has benefited from a couple of - ahem - close decisions in this Olympics already; Joshua at Super-Heavyweight and Agogo at Middleweight both probably beneficiaries of hometown decisions to go through).
FWIW, the referee (from Turkmenistan) has been expelled, and the decision for that fight has been reversed. The Japanese fighter, Shimizu, is the winner.
However there is still time for AIBA to make good on their end of the bargain alleged last year: Olympic gold for Azerbaijan. For $10 million.
As per the link, though, what got the decision reversed was that (a) the fight should be stopped if a boxer gets knocked down three times in one round, and (b) of the six times Abiyev fell to the canvas in that round, at least three were knockdowns.
The announcers on CNBC can hardly contain themselves watching these matches, as the “judges” keeping scoring things incorrectly. If they don’t fix this, they should just cancel the sport as an Olympic sport.
While the knockdown one is extreme, lots of insane round-wins have been recorded, including one that knocked out an American yesterday.