Knocked down

Only three Russians made it to the semi-final stage

Today is an official day off for the boxing competition program. There is a slight lull before the semi-final fights, the winners of which will have a real chance to become Olympic champions. But the day before, on August 19, we arranged a one-day vacation for ourselves, which, despite their transience, can rightfully be called historical. For the first time during our participation in the Games, none of our boxers entered the ring on the working day of the Olympics, because in the weight categories 54 kg, 57 kg and over 91 kg, presented on this day, we lost our fighters at an early stage of the fight. Including two current world champions. Albert Selimov and Islam Timurziev lost in the first fight, Sergey Vodopyanov - in the second.

At the moment, the undisputed contenders for team victory are the Cubans: of the ten boxers from the Liberty Island team who began fighting for Olympic medals, eight remain in the ranks (weight categories 48 kg, 51 kg, 54 kg, 60 kg, 64 kg, 69 kg, 75 kg and 91 kg). The Chinese are in second place in this indicator: they have four fighters who continue to advance to the highest step of the podium (48 kg, 69 kg, 81 kg and over 91 kg). The teams of Italy, Great Britain, Ireland, France and Russia retained three boxers each. Two each are the teams of Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Thailand and Mongolia.

Our hopes are now connected with the bronze medalist of the 2001 World Championship Georgy Balakshin (51 kg), the 2004 Olympic champion Alexey Tishchenko (60 kg) and the silver medalist of the 2007 World Championship Rakhim Chakhkiev (81 kg). Never since the first performance of the Russians as an independent team have we suffered such losses on the approaches to the semi-final battles. And this is doubly offensive because, compared to the three previous Olympics, Russia in Beijing is represented by perhaps the strongest team. Alas, now an ex. I just want to shout to the three guys who remained in the ranks: “Hold on, dear ones, save the prestige of the country!”

What happened to the team, about which on the eve of the Games it was said that almost every boxer in its composition was capable of fighting for Olympic gold? Nobody knows a definite answer to this question. Communicating with the leadership of the team from the first day of the Olympics, the Vremya Novostei correspondent heard at least four reasons explaining this failure. The first is incredible: our guys underestimated their opponents in the first battles. If this is so, then there was no need to go to the Olympics at all, because, as you know, there are no weak opponents. The second is professional: since the previous Games, amateur boxing has changed a lot, it has become more powerful, the skill of all teams has increased (at the current tournament you can count on one hand the fights that ended early with a 20-point advantage for one of the fighters), and ours were up to it not ready. The third is psychological: of the eight Russian boxers who dropped out of the competition, only Gennady Kovalev (64 kg) had experience of competing at the Olympics. None of them was able to cope with the anxiety inherent in debut fights in Beijing. The fourth is traditional: biased judging. This is a long-standing disease of amateur boxing, and, needless to say, the current Olympic tournament is also suffering from it. But if we talk about the fights lost by the Russians, then only two of our losers can fairly make claims against the judges - Kovalev and David Airapetyan (48 kg). The rest have only themselves to blame. The fatal blow missed by super heavyweight Islam Timurziev from the Englishman David Price, the weak-willed fight of Matvey Korobov (75 kg) with the Kazakh Bakhtiyar Aktaev, the third round failed with a score of 0:6 by Albert Selimov (57 kg) in the fight against the Ukrainian Vasily Lomachenko - these are all his own mistakes .

The head coach of the Russian national team, Alexander Lebzyak, told the Vremya Novostei correspondent another reason: the guys, they say, sometimes “didn’t hear” him during fights. He told them one thing, but in the ring they did something completely different. If this is really the case, then these are problems exclusively of the head coach, who failed to find a common language with his players.

But let’s not bury our team ahead of time, since there is still hope to even repeat the result of the Athens Olympics in gold medals. At least Balakshin, Tishchenko and Chakhkiev already have bronze medals in their pockets. They have already fit into the rhythm of the Olympic competitions. Now let's have more luck!

Boris VALIEV, Beijing