The round of 32 finished Wednesday morning. After Rau’shee Warren’s disappointing first-round loss, it was nice to see Luis Yanez and Deontay Wilder bounce back with victories and continue on in the tournament.
Team USA went 5-3 in the first round, a worse record than many expected. While watching the Olympics, two questions popped in my head:
- Is an Olympic medal required to become a boxing champion?
- Flipping the other question on its head, of course it's nice to win a gold medal (or any medal at that), but does success in the Olympics lead to a successful pro career?
Obviously, there is no generic answer to these questions. While some of the best professional boxers have won gold, like Muhammad Ali in Rome during the 1960 Olympics, other top fighters gained stardom without the Olympics, specifically Rocky Marciano.
The first question was the easier of the two to research.
I comprised a list of all the current boxing champions in each weight class according to the WBA, WBC, WBO, IBF, and Ring Magazine. I simply went through each fighter’s bio to see if they had ever won a medal in the Olympics (world championships did not count).
Out of a total of 61 boxing champions, only seven have won Olympic medals.
That is only 11 percent of today’s major titlists!
Out of the seven who won medals, there were three gold-medal winners, one silver, and three bronze.
While Wladimir Klitschko won the gold medal in 1996, the other two gold medal winners aren’t obvious champions in the boxing world today.
Joel Cassamayor, the Ring Magazine Lightweight Champion who won gold in 1992, does not deserve to be among today’s champions because he clearly lost his WBC interim title bout to Jose Armando Santa Cruz.
Lastly, Brahim Asloum, the WBA light flyweight champion, impressively won gold in the 2000 Olympics. While I do not wish to take any accomplishments away from Asloum, I doubt that many boxing fans know that he is a world champion (I didn’t), which might be caused by Ivan Calderon being the posterboy of the division.
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