Amateur boxing
Amateur boxing rewards point-scoring blows, based on the number of clean punches landed, rather than physical power.
[3] Amateur boxing emerged as a sport during the mid-to-late 19th century, partly as a result of the moral controversies surrounding professional prize-fighting.
Originally lampooned as an effort by upper and middle-class gentlemen to co-opt a traditionally working class sport, the safer, "scientific" style of boxing found favour in schools, universities and in the armed forces, although the champions still usually came from among the urban poor.
[citation needed] Amateur boxing to this day have several scoring systems, depending on the tournament regulations and sanctioning authority.
Several archaic score systems, that survived to the 1980s (and in some places to this day), the first of which is a 3-point system, which gave one point for each of three rounds (therefore 3–0 stands for a clean victory by points, 2–1 means that defeated opponent dominated one round, 1–1–1 stands for a draw or ex aequo, which was a very rare occurrence).
Both systems lead to a number of controversial and officially contested results, as punch statistics (thrown-to-landed) mostly wasn't accounted for by either one.
At the 1960 Rome Olympics preliminaries, after Soviet Oleg Grigoryev was controversially ruled a winner over Great Britain's Francis Taylor, the IOC decided to relieve some 15 of the referees and judges of their duties before the quarterfinals.
[7] After the 1988 Seoul Olympics controversy, when the clearly dominant finalist Roy Jones Jr. of the U.S. (whom even the Soviet judges ruled to be a winner, let alone the commentators and his beaten opponent, who himself apologized for the injustice) was virtually robbed of the gold medal, a new system was created and implemented, where only clean punches score, although a controversy still exist as to what is a clean punch in one's personal opinion, leading to another dubious results.
The semifinals of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics proved the new points system susceptible to controversy as well, when Kazakhstani Vassiliy Jirov was pronounced a 15–9 score winner over U.S. Antonio Tarver, with many observers were left confused, believing Tarver was dominant through the entire bout.
Three out of the five judges had to press the button for the same boxer within a one-second window in order for the point to score.
[9] On several occasions in the 1990s, professional boxers, mostly from the post-Soviet states, resumed their amateur careers, namely: Nikolay Kulpin and Oleg Maskaev in 1993, Nikolai Valuev in 1994, Ruslan Chagaev in 1998.
In June 2016, professional boxers were admitted in the Olympic Games and other tournaments sanctioned by the AIBA.
[10] This was done in part to level the playing field and give all of the athletes the same opportunities government-sponsored boxers from socialist countries and post-Soviet republics have.
[12] As it is accustomed to in the West, amateur boxers do not compete at the Olympiads consecutively, they turn pro right after they participated in the Games or in other sporting event of international importance, while boxers from Cuba and certain post-Soviet states, which have professional sports there banned today or had it previously, are state-sponsored and frequently stay on in the amateurs, while being arguably professionals de facto, and compete in multiple Olympics.
[4][13] Prior to this decision, it was customary in the West for amateur boxers not to compete at successive Olympiads, but rather to turn professional immediately after participating in the Games or in other sporting events of international importance.
USA Boxing also sanctions a national tournament to determine who will compete on the United States national boxing team at the Olympic Games (either directly qualifying for the Olympics or through worldwide or regional qualifying tournaments).
