Professional boxers cleared to compete at the Olympic Games

The former.

 

TBH, that has always been a problem even for sparring professionally as well...

 

I'll try again. You were wrong about head guards. They are not going to be used at the 2016 Olympics. You made 3 points. The first was incorrect.

 

Yeah I know.
I just went off onto a different tangent and said they should also be stopped in profesional sparring...

 

Oh, gotcha.

I've seen the arguments about how head gear is more dangerous, more concussions, etc. I am skeptical. All I tend to see is correlations when these arguments are made and then bs guessing. I prefer some scientific explanation to back up this theory before I latch onto it. Counter intuitive arguments are often correct, but they are often incorrect.

 

I also doubt that headgear are more dangerous. When i boxed, i found that punches were a lot softer when i wore a headgear. Its true that they do gives you a false sentiment of security though, and makes it harder to slip punches

 

The punches feel softer, but the brain rattling around in your cranium doesn't know the difference

 

Yeah, i heard the argument that it actually made it harder for the brain because the extra weight on your head make the backsplash effect more pronounced, but i actually dont know of it is true

 

me either

 

I think I read 10 years ago or so, that Barry McGuigan said as much as you guys have in the last few posts: 14-16oz gloves + head-gear = brain\cranium trauma.
The weight of the gloves and headgear causes far more of a widespread ´shock´ as opposed to a 6-8oz glove alone....

 

Are their a lot of punch drunk Cuban and Russian ams from having hundreds of dangerous headgear fights?

 

It just doesn't make sense for professional boxers to compete at the Olympic Games.

 

The only problem with pro boxers (also basketball and hockey players) is that they don't have to take any doping tests during training seasons whereas the other Olympic athletes are tested all the time. Cheaters are on the same line with the rest

 

This

 

Agreed, it's ridiculous now anyway. They lost the spirit of it years ag with including people like Steffi Graf.

 

Letting pros in to play other sports was a way to appease pussy American egos. Probably part of the reason to let pros box, as well.

 

Nah, it was/is just stupid to deny one country from sending their best athletes to Olympics but allow another country to use their professionals.

Pretty much all the major Olympic athletes have been professionals since 1960s when Soviet Union and other East European countries began to weasel their way around the professional rules by calling their athletes 'soldiers' whose only duty was to train

 

We've all heard that argument before. To me, it's just really disingenuous and ridiculous to say that Fedor Chimikov making $50,000 per year as a 'professional' soldier/basketball player is the same as someone playing in the NBA making $2,500,000.

The Olympics should be for 'amateurs' and making $50,000 shouldn't be considered making you a 'pro' in anything, especially when actual pros are making well over 20x that amount.

It gets more convoluted when endorsements enter the picture, but the main point is...it's the Olympics. It's about amateurs. If Canada, USA, Russia, or Zimbabwe want to try to game the system to win a few more golds, who cares? Others believe the Olympics should be about a country's best athletes, regardless. I get it, I just disagree.

This is even more true today when no one is denied the chance to be a true pro in their sport and make real mega money.

 

But you also need to realize that the ideal of amateur Olympics is from an era when sports people were seriously debating whether or not training should be allowed for Olympics, much less professionalism. Seriously, as late as in the 1930s it was a legitimate debate whether or not training athletes should be disqualified from the Olympics.

Perhaps somebody could claim, then, tat modern heavyweights are closest to the original Olympics ideal::

The point of Olympics has always been to find the best athletes in the world. The amateur status was created so that nobody would get an unfair advantage of being able to train more than the rest, money was never the issue. And since the Olympic athletes, boxers included, are training full-time now, there is no reason anymore to ban athletes who do the same but make more cash

 

I hear you UGO and well argued as usual ( your intelligence impresses me) however, the real point is that the Olympics should only feature sports where the Olympics are the pinnacle of that sport. as such I even think basketball should be eliminated. I would even go as far as to say that only individual disciplines should be featured. Olympics is not a team sport place. Now there may be exceptions to that latter part, volleyball for one, but for the most part it's about individual prowess when you go all the way back to Ancient Greece.

 

Money May would DOMINATE the Paralympics

 

I agree completely with this take, it is just a bit different argument. I was disagreeing with Mike whether or not professional athletes should be banned from the games altogether, and in my opinion, there is no sensible reason to do that.

I do agree that Olympics should be the main event of every sport that is included, and if I had my way, I would boot football, tennis etc. Volleyball I would keep since Olympics is the biggest tournament around. Basketball too perhaps since it is the biggest tournament for national teams. NBA is the Champions League whereas Olympics is the World Cup, if you compare to football.

However, since boxing is not going to be booted from Olympics, in my opinion it should be an open field for anybody under the amateur rules. The winner would be the best boxer under the amateur rules as he is now, it doesn't have and shouldn't have anything to do with being the best professional in the world.

If some top pro wants to try to win with soft gloves and pussy rules, he is allowed to, but nobody will. Any mediocre pro isn't beating the best Olympic boxers so nothing actually changes

 

Every pro will have nice built-in excuses for losing. It's not just the different rules, I'm sure we'd also hear "if there just a few more rounds I would have knocked him out."

 

Agree with ugo and Sly

 

But we aren't discussing whether or not training should be allowed. In fact, no one alive during our lifetimes would argue that Olympic athletes shouldn't be able to train, making your point either irrelevant, a straw man, or a non sequitur.

On the other hand, the idea that professionals shouldn't be able to compete in the Olympics is ingrained in everyone alive today who learned about the Olympics prior to 1988. That's what the Jim Thorpe legend is all about. Pros were allowed to compete at that point because pussy Americans started crying when they lost the stranglehold on basketball dominance.

The Jim Thorpe story completely erases the idea that the Olympics were about the 'best' athletes from each country competing against each other and enforces the idea that the Olympics were about the 'best amateur' athletes competing against each other. Certainly, positions evolved, but to me, the best compromise would be making some income cutoff that establishes the difference between pros and amateurs in each sport. Yes, it may differ between sports (or not) and yes that's going to create a somewhat arbitrary standard, but it would stay true to the ethos that I maintain is closer to the true ethos of 'best amateur' than 'best' athletes from each country.

The idea that a great athlete would forego turning pro in order to represent his country at the Olympics is part and parcel of what makes the Olympics great. Permitting mega rich pros just turns it into a glorified event for pros in many sports. Gold medalists in basketball, tennis, shit like that, are who cares? type champions in my mind because those sports have more important competitions and titles. Just like pro boxing.

For what it's worth, I wouldn't suggest precluding pros from competing in the Olympics except for in their professional sport. Herschel Walker in the bobsled, some cornerback in the sprints...go for it.

 

Different countries have different economies so a player having his home and expenses covered and getting a tax free 50k a year might not be living too much 'worse' than an NBA player getting a net of a few million a year.

If they live better than an office worker and don't actually work than they're a well paid pro athlete.

 

Wrestling and boxing have a long tradition so I don't see why not. But no kicking!