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Twenty years ago at the Olympic Games in Seoul, a good-news Canadian sports story was largely lost in the Ben Johnson shuffle.
Our boxing team, led by super heavyweight gold medalist Lennox Lewis, was the best in the country's history. Egerton Marcus claimed silver, Raymond Downey bronze.
There was an asterisk attached, since the sport's reigning amateur power, Cuba, boycotted those Games. But there's no denying the quality of that group, especially given the heights Lewis would reach as a professional.
So maybe it was a bit of a historic fluke. Maybe what happened at the next two Olympics was closer to the norm. In Barcelona in 1992, Chris Johnson won a bronze medal for Canada, and Mark Leduc won a surprise silver.
Four years later, in Atlanta, the first time the Olympics employed the qualifying system that's still in use, Canada sent 11 boxers to the tournament – one under the max – and claimed a silver with heavyweight David Defiagbon.
Then things began to slide precipitously … Sydney, 2000, seven fighters qualified, a couple of legitimate medal hopes in Troy Ross and Mike Strange, but nothing to show for it … Athens, 2004, five boxers qualified, including three who had to win their places on the team through an arbitrator, no medals won.
Come August in Beijing, it's Olympic time again. And Canada will be represented by one – one – boxer, Adam Trupish, a 29-year-old amateur veteran who was on the team four years ago and is given little or no hope of contending for a medal this time around.
Want some more numbers? In the Commonwealth Games, where Canadian boxers once dominated, the medal count fell from eight in 1998, to seven in 2002, to one in 2006. At the 1999 Pan American Games, Canada won six medals. Four years later, four. Last year, a single bronze.
If the sport were dying of its own volition in Canada, that would be one thing (and of course there are plenty of people, including some involved in the Olympic movement, who would be more than happy if boxing would just go away). But look at what's happening on the professional side in Quebec right now, with two well-financed promotional groups making Montreal the busiest boxing jurisdiction in North America outside Las Vegas.
Canadian pros are winning world titles at an unprecedented clip, whether it be Steve Molitor or Joachim Alcine, or two Romanian-born fighters now based here, Lucien Bute and Adrian Diaconu. Maybe not quite a golden age, but with signs of life in Vancouver and Edmonton and Winnipeg and Halifax as well, it's pretty darned close.
So you have a sport thriving at its most visible level, and yet apparently dying in the amateur ranks. The finger points naturally toward Boxing Canada, a notorious old-boys club, to elected officials and bureaucrats who surely seem to be leading the amateur game down the fast track to extinction. The complaints against Boxing Canada from within the sport are legion, whether in terms of a series of disciplinary incidents involving Canadian fighters at international tournaments, or a lack of political clout at the sport's international level, or simply the age-old beef that there always seems to be money for officials to travel.
Robert Crete, Boxing Canada's executive director, blames the professional promoters in Montreal for stealing away bright amateur prospects who might otherwise be on the Olympic team. “They needed boxers to do their shows,” he says. “We have nothing to compete with the professionals and the salaries they pay them.”
But on closer examination, that explanation hardly holds water. Precious few Olympic-ready fighters have turned pro before taking a crack at making the national team, and with a few exceptions, those with the intent of becoming professionals did so after a single Olympics (Lewis and Strange are among those who went to multiple Games).
What seems more likely is a massive failure at the administrative and coaching level, one already noted by Sport Canada, which, in the increasingly performance-driven world of amateur sport, has slashed Boxing Canada's annual stipend by $150,000 because of poor results.
What that means is a sport that used to enjoy funding in the neighbourhood of $800,000 a year will now have to exist on less than $250,000 a year. There is no national team coach, and in the cycle leading up to the 2012 Games in London, only two or three boxers will be fully carded.
Crete describes this phase as “a rebuilding stage,” but it's hard to imagine how anything can be rebuilt on top of that minuscule foundation.
“There is extra pressure here we can feel,” he says, in advance of what will be a short, uncomfortable turn in the spotlight this summer.
Don't hold your breath waiting for better days, for the next Lennox Lewis to come along.
