Spare us.
If so it'll just be another on the now fairly long list of new and ridiculous Olympic "sports."
No boxing--this is NCAA:
Catastrophic-injury research
Direct injuries
The number of direct injuries per 100,000 participants for college sports from 1982-83 through 1995-96:
Male
Sport -- Fatalities -- Nonfatal -- Serious
Baseball -- 0.68 -- 0.00 -- 0.34
Basketball -- 0.00 -- 0.54 -- 1.09
Cross country -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Football -- 0.48 -- 1.71 -- 5.81
Gymnastics -- 0.00 -- 27.44 -- 9.14
Ice hockey -- 0.00 -- 5.49 -- 5.49
Lacrosse -- 0.00 -- 1.45 -- 2.91
Skiing -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Soccer -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.48
Swimming -- 0.00 -- 0.91 -- 0.00
Tennis -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Track -- 0.43 -- 0.43 -- 0.64
Wrestling -- 0.00 -- 0.98 -- 0.00
Female
Sport -- Fatalities -- Nonfatal -- Serious
Basketball -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Cross country -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Field hockey -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 1.39
Gymnastics -- 0.00 -- 9.13 -- 0.00
Ice hockey -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Lacrosse -- 0.00 -- 2.34 -- 0.00
Skiing -- 14.13 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Soccer -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Softball -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Swimming -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Tennis -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Track -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Wrestling -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Indirect injuries
The number of indirect injuries per 100,000 participants for college sports from 1982-83 through 1995-96:
Male
Sport -- Fatalities -- Nonfatal -- Serious
Baseball -- 0.68 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Basketball -- 5.98 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Cross country -- 0.74 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Football -- 2.19 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Gymnastics -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Ice hockey -- 1.83 -- 1.83 -- 0.00
Lacrosse -- 1.45 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Skiing -- 9.49 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Soccer -- 0.97 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Swimming -- 2.74 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Tennis -- 0.92 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Track -- 0.21 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Water polo -- 6.81 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Wrestling -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Female
Sport -- Fatalities -- Nonfatal -- Serious
Basketball -- 0.64 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Cross country -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Gymnastics -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Ice hockey -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Lacrosse -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Skiing -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Soccer -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Softball -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Swimming -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Tennis -- 0.97 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Track -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Water polo -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Wrestling -- 0.00 -- 0.00 -- 0.00
Not anymore . . .
A PhD and she steps into a ring to let people cause TBI.
Smart.
Sad.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
If you've seen the film clips of the fight, you'll have noticed that the punch that dropped/killed her was not a particularly tremendous punch. Both boxers were flurrying at each other, wide open defensively, and the bigger girl landed one of her flurry punches on the headgear over the left eye of Zerlentes.
Her head didn't react to the punch, her neck was not turned from the punch, her face never distorted. She was leaning forward when the punch "bounced" off her headgear and she just fell forward into the lower ropes.
Sometimes it's hard to gauge the force behind a punch, but this one was not a wind-up Sunday punch by any means, and I was very surprised that Zerlentes went down. She fell into the ropes and was bounced back into the ring, on her back, and she never moved a muscle. Obviously, given the outcome, she had suffered serious brain damage the moment she was hit.
And she was hit on the headgear, so the force of the punch would have been softened by the glove and the headgear. (I do not mean to say that that kind of a blow cannot do damage, it's just highly unlikely that it will.)
I think Zerlentes' death was a fluke of some kind, possibly from a previous head injury or perhaps due to an unknown susceptibility in her brain.
So, I think this tragedy wasn't because she was a female boxer, she was a boxer with a fragile brain. Deaths such as this happen in boxing now and then. I don't believe her being female had anything to do with it.