The Paris Olympics are still in full swing, but the representatives of our National Boxing Team have stopped throwing punches for several days now, all eliminated between the first and second rounds of the tournament. A failed expedition, started with boastful proclamations and great ambitions but ended ingloriously: zero medals, many controversies, and very little accountability.
It would certainly be unfair to attribute all the blame for this colossal flop to a single subject. These disastrous Olympics, which also reflect the rather precarious state of Italian boxing, are the poisoned fruit of multiple errors committed over several years by a multitude of actors. However, the percentage of responsibility can only grow, necessarily, as one climbs the hierarchical ladder of the movement, with the top leaders who have the moral obligation to pronounce the main mea culpa and who instead, these days, prefer to rely on the blame game.
Among the least guilty are certainly the athletes, the last link in the chain of command, who gave their best and who certainly had to swallow the bitterest pill of all by seeing the dream they had nurtured since childhood of climbing the podium vanish. Sure, the protesting behavior of Salvatore Cavallaro at the end of a dull and inconclusive performance is reprehensible. Sure, the immediate surrender of Angela Carini, probably entering the ring without really intending to try, can be subject to debate. But they are still young, undoubtedly conditioned by the enormous tension of the big event and cannot be put in front of a firing squad for their mistakes.
The responsibility starts to grow when you move from the boxers to the technical staff, who had the task of putting the Italian team in the best possible conditions to do well and guide it towards the coveted goal during the tournament. The objective was not achieved, and it is not lese-majesty to express strong doubts about the initial choices that characterized the approach to these Games. Boxers of great value, even national champions, did not even have the opportunity to try to qualify due to arbitrary and questionable choices, but from this point of view, there is no counterproof: it is not demonstrable, in fact, that those who were left out would have done better than those who were there.
What can be said without resorting to fantasy or imagination is that our two top athletes, Aziz Abbes Mouhiidine and Irma Testa, were unable to fully adapt to the transition that has characterized amateur boxing for several years. From the era of point-scoring machines where it was advantageous to keep bouncing and hitting, we have firmly entered an era where aggressiveness and impact of punches play a fundamental role in convincing the judges. As much as Mouhiidine was a victim of an injustice, and as much as Testa fought on equal terms against her opponent, those who follow our athletes did them no favor by inducing them to maintain a stylistic setup that pays off less and less today.
There were also strong concerns about the athletic condition of our athletes. Heavy breathing, tired arms, and sudden drops in continuity of action starting from the second round characterized the fights of several members of the Italian team, making it impossible not to raise serious questions about the training methods adopted in the months leading up to the event.
Finally, let’s address the painful notes, namely the top of the pyramid that, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, should assume the largest percentage of responsibility for the failure and instead prefers to dodge it like a cat dodges water.
Moreover, it became clear since the day of that fight that the unjust verdict against Mouhiidine would be used by our Federation as a fig-leaf to justify a possibly unsatisfactory team result by reading the surreal statement issued by President Flavio D’Ambrosi, deeply wrong in tone, timing, and content.
Wrong in tone, because words like “shame on you,” “robbed,” “outrages,” “disastrous,” and “insult” are far disproportionate to a verdict that I myself consider wrong, but which does not fall among the worst seen in these Olympics and which, by virtue of two narrowly won rounds, does not justify such hysteria.
Wrong in timing, because with Italian athletes still in competition, it was certainly not wise to shoot at the organization with such heavy words, risking our other boxers suffering revenge and unfavorable treatment.
Wrong in content, because it seems inconceivable at such a delicate moment for the team to divert the spotlight on oneself, hinting at an implausible step back, promptly denied at record speed in the following days. A manifestation of victimhood decidedly out of context.
It must have seemed unreal to our Federation to flaunt, besides the verdicts, another excuse in virtue of the affair involving our Angela Carini and the Algerian athlete Imane Khelif, widely discussed in every corner of the globe. An affair on which the FPI has shown disconcerting hypocrisy: at first, it accepted the rules by allowing the Italian athlete to regularly step into the ring, and then, after the defeat, contested them between the lines, subtly implying in its communications that it had suffered an injustice without having the courage to speak out directly.
One of two things: either our Federation believed that Angela Carini’s match was marked by an unjust competitive disadvantage, in which case it should have withdrawn the boxer from the tournament to safeguard her safety, or it judged the competition fair, in which case it should have accepted the ring’s verdict without whining and recriminations after the fact.
The final statement signed by D’Ambrosi, which the FPI published after the elimination of the last Italian boxer, is therefore, predictably, the quintessence of blame-shifting: a long list of culprits on whom to pin the debacle before smiling again at the next elections. From the judges for their verdicts to the organizers for their rules, from the staff needing “new human resources” to the too-experienced boxers who will have to leave the National team, to the “old and obsolete” management models (as if there hadn’t been time and means to change them), everyone gets their reprimand, everyone except the one signing the statement, of course.
But what leaves one most astonished when reading D’Ambrosi’s words is the assertion that Italian boxing has “grown strongly, both quantitatively and qualitatively” in the last three years. Allow me, then, to conclude this article full of bitterness with a joke: I have been following boxing for about twenty years and if the words of every President who took office in these last two decades about the prodigious growth of the movement under their management were true, today we would have more world champions than the United States of America. Apparently, not everyone is telling the truth.