This was the last version of the Tournament Flat Girón with the presence of headgear, from January on the so-called Project 16 of AIBA will rule amateur boxing.
A simple glance to the final day of the Tournament of Boxing showed an event that lacks the sauce of the sport: the knockouts. And the fact is that the spectacular nature of this discipline is given precisely in seeing men falling down on the ring. There was not a single knockout in the gold medal contest of the Cuban national championship!
Looking for the emotion of the public in the facilities and to achieve a real mediatic show constitutes the current goals of the International Association of Amateur Boxing (AIBA). And the fact is that the rules determine whether a contest belongs to the professional or amateur categories. In other sports as soccer, baseball or tennis, just to mention a few, the difference is given by the way of earning the salary between a sportsman and other and not for the essence of the game itself.
From 2013 amateur boxers will compete with the new modifications brought by the AIBA Project 16, which also includes the reduction in the gloves, thus beginning a new Olympian cycle that will have his climax in Brazil 2016. This way the practice of this sport in Cuba will get closer to the professional style.
If Cuba sets the regulations for its tournaments, why didn’t it implement the changes in a national competition less than a month away from the change of rules?
Traditionally this tournament was held in the first two months of every calendar, but this time it was not like that. I believe sincerely that that one should have been the starting point so that coaches and athletes could tune up mechanisms and strategies to face the new era. Coach boss Rolando Acebal himself declared to the digital website JIT that « boxers will have to grant more importance to the defense, including the movements of trunk, something despised now, and rationalize that the blows are going to be more dangerous ».
When asked about this issue London Olympic champion Roniel Iglesias, declared that this had not worried him because in the trainings they already fight this way, so that “ I am ready to assume the change ”, he said.
With the changes, I would dare to assure, the best physically prepared fighters will have better dividends in the tournaments that are coming, and from point of view, it will not be too farfetched to think that those of the biggest of the Antilles will be benefited. I remind them that it was like that, precisely this way, without headgear, that the great Teófilo Stevenson made history, who was considered by his devastating punch as the best amateur boxer in history.
