Posted on 08/15/2008 2:04:40 PM PDT by Shermy
BEIJING, Aug. 15 -- In a hallway of the Beijing Workers Gymnasium on Friday night U.S. boxer Raynell Williams buried his head in a towel, leaned against a door and wondered just what it was he had done so wrong on an evening when he appeared to do everything right.
A few feet away, his coach Dan Campbell, gnawed on a toothpick and glared.
"I just called back to the people in the tape room and everybody said it was (expletive)," Campbell said after Williams lost a second round fight he looked to have decisively won against France's Khedafi Djelkhir. Williams "was landing three shots to one."
In an Olympics boxing competition where judging has become such a topic that the head of the boxing judges had to call a news conference on Friday to say he is pretty certain the men in his charge are not corrupt and he doesn't believe they are incompetent, it was hard to sell to the U.S. contingent that both didn't somehow apply.
"We're talking about a lot of punches that didn't get counted," Campbell said. "I think we're talking about eight points" that Wlliams should have had. "That's crazy."
Then again, crazy seemed to be a theme on Friday. Five hours before the Williams fight, Terry Smith, the head delegate of the International Amateur Boxing Association sat under a bank of television lights and tried to dispel growing complaints that the judging at this Olympics has deteriorated into a farce. Particularly in the case of the host country China, which has almost no recent boxing history and yet whose fighters have managed to win 11 of 15 fights -- many under dubious circumstances.
If Smith meant to squelch the criticism he hardly sounded convincing...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
When that Chinese girl wobbled all over the balance beam on what was clearly not a very difficult routine, and then scored like a 16.1, I was incredulous.
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You’ve gotta give that Chinese kid a break after all she’s only 14 /s
How about going back to pro boxing rules? It isn’t the number of hits, but the location & power that are important.
Ever since I watched the Olympic boxing at Georgia Tech back in ‘96 I realized this is a sport where the judges are obviously biased one way or the other, and almost always against the USA, and there is no ‘legal controlling authority’ it seems to prevent it.
It is a joke, I watched the bout in question here and there were many punches landed that didn’t count except for the Frenchman.
Typical
When young, I was told boxing was the best sport because, as in life, winning consisted of getting off the mat one more time than your opponent.
That isn’t a problem when judges score how often you hit...
I will be leaving tomorrow morning at five a.m.to travel five hours with three teen’s that will be boxing in Carson City,NV. I won't even begin to try to explain how much athletic training they have to go thru before they step into the ring.
Then you never saw the Friday Night Fight at The Garden.
Some of the dives would have won Gold at the Olympics.
If the only way to win is by a judge’s call, it’s not a sport. It may be athletic, but it’s not a sport.
I feel bad for these boxers.
Reminds me of the American boxer who was cheated of a Gold Medal in Korea a couple decades ago. I guess I'll catch some of the highlights on youtube. What is the answer when the fix is in?
You devil (wink wink...)
kind of defeats the purpose of the games in my opinion
get them in the octagon and let them go at it. yeah!
“In other news, some American runner for the 800m had to quit today right after the qualifying race started. Seems she’s been sick, puking up and hasn’t been able to eat for four days...probably some food poisoning in the cafeteria or drinking the water or breathing the air or just being there made her sick to her stomach”
They’ve mentioned several of the swimmers were sick with stomach problems too...got to wonder about it..
They should replace it with the UFC—pretty hard for a judge to screw that up when the opponent ends up an immobile pretzel.
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