It was 19 years after Seoul, at a training camp in Germany, that Billy Walsh decided to disinter the few words of Korean he’d memorised at those ’88 Olympics.
Mannaseo Bangawoyo!” he said, pushing his hand in welcome to a new arrival.
“Ah, you speak Korean?” replied Park Si-hun.
“Well, I was in Seoul,” Walsh replied.
“Me too!”
“What weight?”
“71kg!”
“Roy Jones?”
“Em, yes!” smiled the Korean, his expression visibly sheepish.
Park Si-hun’s gold medal win on the final day of the Seoul Games still carries iconic status today in boxing’s hall of infamy. Given a farcical verdict over Roy Jones Junior, he retired immediately afterwards, taking up teaching in a rural seaside town.
He would say later that he felt embarrassed by the decision and suffered from depression because he knew it had a corrupt provenance.
When they met in that German training camp in 2007, it was clear to Walsh that Park Si-hun was a likeable man who took no pride in his status as an Olympic champion. “He was actually a really funny guy,” Billy remembered this week. “We were both head coaches in that camp and went out for a few beers.
“I’d used those few words of Korean just to break the ice, never realising who I was actually talking to.”
Two referees were sent home from those Seoul Olympics, including the New Zealander who officiated on Walsh’s second-round stoppage defeat to another Korean boxer, Song Kyung-Sup. It was, at the time, considered a watershed moment for the sport with computer scoring introduced at the ’89 World Championships in Moscow. As Walsh remembers: “That was great. You could go in and beat a Russian now!”
But, over time, ways were discovered to manipulate computer scoring too and boxing reverted to a questionable variation of the old system, culminating – 33 years after Seoul – in last week’s McLaren Report that cast such a scathing light on officiating at the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
Michael Conlan’s quarter-final defeat to Russia’s Vladimir Nikitin is one of 11 Rio verdicts deemed sufficiently ‘dubious’ to require further analysis by Professor Richard McLaren.
Though Walsh spoke to McLaren during the compiling of the report, he hasn’t seen that full list and believes that decisions against two US fighters, Mikaela Mayer and Gary Russell, also merit further investigation.
In the meantime, the very concept of Olympic boxing is left hanging by a thread with genuine concerns it may be removed from the Olympic programme for Paris 2024.
“I’m very, very fearful that we will not be in the next Olympic Games,” Billy admitted this week. “It’s a sport I’ve been in all my life, a sport I love. But this report should have been commissioned a long time ago because these rumblings have been going on for as long as I’ve been in the sport.
“I know the Task Force made a great effort to address it for Tokyo and they did a good job. But in some places, the corruption is just in their culture. It’s systemic.”
The Task Force Walsh refers to essentially ran the boxing tournament at this year’s Olympics after an IOC decision to suspend recognition of world boxing’s governing body, AIBA, due to concerns over finance, governance, ethics, refereeing and judging.
And Walsh believes that even more drastic action may be required now.
“For me, AIBA needs to go!” he says flatly. “Start with a new name, new freshness. If the people in charge have any sense, they’ll wipe the slate clean now. Start afresh on the recommendations coming out of this report.
“I think it’s the only way forward. For me and people like me, boxing is the top sport in the world. Are we going to lose our sport because of politics and skulduggery?”
Boxing’s history of corruption is a stubbornly resilient one that has been casting an asterisk beside the biggest championships for as long as Walsh has been involved. He tells a story about the early days of working with Gary Keegan in the High Performance unit on Dublin’s South Circular Road and the advice they were given by a coach from Eastern Europe.
“We were getting ready for the 2004 European Championships and this fella said to us, ‘Give me two thousand euro and I’ll promise you a gold medal!’
“His idea was that you’d visit a referee, judge or tournament official in their hotel beforehand. Now we just wouldn’t do that.
“Even if we had the money, which we didn’t, we’d never have gone down that route. It would just have made us a part of a rotten system.
“I could never get my head around the idea that a decision could have been made before we even got to the ring. You’d never think it could be that blatant. But that was the naivety of some of us in the West.”
Over the years, Walsh would encounter multiple reminders that not everything encountered in amateur boxing could be taken at face value.
Keegan drew up a report for AIBA on what they witnessed as “disgraceful” manipulation of the computer scoring at a qualifying tournament in Azerbaijan for the ’04 Olympics. Then there was the shocking hometown verdict in Turkey against Joe Ward during qualifying for the London Games.
“Joe Ward got robbed, a terrible decision,” Billy remembers. “And it’s only now you begin to understand what happened there. Young Joe at the time was world number two. He’d been a world youth champion and a European senior champion at just 17, something that couldn’t happen now because you have to be 18.
“London was his time. I remember the decision was so outrageous, we had a real job on our hands keeping the other boxers’ heads clear. Everybody just went crazy.
“Joe, I know, will never forget that moment. None of us will forget it, we just couldn’t believe it. It was a Roy Jones moment, to be honest. London turned out to be our best Olympic Games, but one of our main gold medal hopes was taken away from us. And we had no recourse to do anything about it. Everything was shut down. AIBA didn’t allow you to challenge a decision by the judges. They were gods.
”It’s disgraceful. That kind of stuff ruins lives and livelihoods.”
In Rio, Zaur Antia claimed he had been told before Conlan’s fight with Nikitin the verdict had already been decided, short of a knockout. The McLaren report now suggests that that may, indeed, have been the case, with 11 contests described as “corrupted”. And this may be a scandal too far now for boxing’s place in Olympia. If it is, Walsh despairs for the very future of his sport.
“We’ll become a tenth-tier sport,” he says if boxing is excluded from Paris 2024. “Everybody will be doing it just for money. You’re going back to the smoke-filled rooms and old speakeasies, you’re going back almost to dog-fighting.
“I fear for the sport, for all these kids who go into the game, because the Olympic Games is what drives them. If that’s gone, where do they go?
“They’re going to look for the money, which will lead to all sorts of shortcuts. And we’ll certainly have a lot less to celebrate in Ireland every four years.
“Having the Olympics as an ambition is holding the sport accountable. If we lose Olympic status, people will go to MMA or the professional ranks. The main driver of our sport is the Olympics. Take that away and it’ll go underground.
“It’s literally that stark!”
