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Sports correspondent & historian with |
A number of the country’s top elite boxers who came to town over Labour Weekend for the North Island Golden Gloves, are preparing to face the biggest challenges of their boxing careers.
The Oceania Olympic qualifying tournament, to be held in the Solomon Islands in November 2023, is the direct pathway for Kiwi boxers to the 2024 Paris Olympic boxing ring.
Following the Boxing New Zealand National Championships hosted in Tauranga in early July, seven male and six female boxers were selected to fight at the Olympic qualifying event, to be held within the South Pacific Games.
New Zealand Olympic boxing selection has had a chequered past. Prior to the introduction of Olympic qualifying tournaments in the 1990s, Olympic selection was in the hands of the New Zealand Olympic Committee.
National Sports bodies would nominate their athletes to the NZ Olympic Committee, who would either confirm, or decline the individual nominations.
The sometime hit or miss process led to a number of top class Kiwi amateur boxers turning professional, after missing Olympic selection. Most notable were future British Empire welterweight champion Barry Brown, and Jimmy Peau, who won the minor IBO world heavyweight title fighting as Jimmy Thunder.
The hands-on selection of New Zealand Olympic boxers was taken out of the hands of the NZ Olympic body, with the introduction of Oceania championships doubling as the regional Olympic qualifying event.
Eleven New Zealand boxers fought at the 1996 Oceania championships in Sydney, with heavyweight Garth da Silva booking a berth at the 1996 Olympics held in Atlanta, USA.
Standing in the way of Oceania Olympic qualification are the enemy from over the ditch, in the form of the Australian boxing team. Better resourced and based at the AIS in Canberra, the Aussies dominate the competition where the big prize is walking into the Olympic ring.
Four years the 1996 Oceania championships, super heavyweight Angus Shelford reserved a trip to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, at the Canberra qualifying event.
A further New Zealand pugilist qualified for the 2004 Olympics, with an Australian shut out in 2008. While no male boxers qualified in 2012, Siona Femandes and Alexis Pritchard made Boxing New Zealand history, by qualifying for the London games by way of the world championships.
The Olympic qualifying hill got a lot steeper in the lead up to the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. The Oceania nations were lumped into an Asia/Oceania qualifying tournament in Qui'an, China and a last chance event in Baku, Azerbaijan. Here we were up against the might of Asia, which also included boxers from countries such as Jordan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Uzbekistan.
The 2020 qualifying turned into a marathon with the advent of Covid. Nine New Zealanders departed for the Wuhan, China qualifying competition, only to be re-routed to Aman in Jordan.
David Nyika won through to qualify for the postponed Tokyo Olympics eventually held in 2021, going on to claiming a precious bronze medal.
The return to standalone Oceania Olympic qualification has been driven by the intervention of the IOC to take charge of Olympic boxing.
An interesting read is the McLaren report into boxing at the 2016 Olympics, where systematic cheating by some AIBA judges and supervising officials took place with tacit approval, from the sport’s governing body.
The Honiara Olympic qualifying tournament will see a battle-hardened Aussie squad endeavouring to make a clean sweep of the Olympic berths on offer.
