Look at fencing to clean up boxing

Boxer Butch is paid to throw a fight by mobster Wallace, instead he takes a counter bet that he will win, and knocks his opponent out dead. Wallace sends out a man to kill Butch. That’s the plot of Pulp Fiction, the 1994 film that made Quentin Tarantino a legend. But such unfairness has played out often in competitive boxing. So it was that Sarita Devi Leishram who pummeled out her South Korean opponent at the Asian Games in Incheon, Korea, was declared the loser and denied gold. Boxing judgments are subjective, given over to three wise men who sit on the sidelines: each body blow, which counts as a point, is not registered publicly and in real time, but is left to the judges to count. Unsurprisingly, crowd favourites can win a match even when they have been out-boxed by rivals.

Despite all this, another Manipuri woman boxer, M C Mary Kom, won gold in a lower weight category. She is a world champion several times over and an Olympic medallist. Though even in the London Olympics, regional bias and a difference in weight and height made sure that her British opponent would triumph over her in one of the medal rounds. Here, in Incheon, it probably helped Mary that her rival in the final was from Kazakhstan, with very few people rooting for her. If it had been otherwise, say, if her opponent had been South Korean, the results could well have been different.

If competitive boxing is to continue as a sport — and it should —its rules have to be changed. Subjective rulings and eye level judgments have no role in modern contact sports. Technology now enables people to have an instant clue about every touch on the opponent: the best example is fencing, where the rapiers, costumes and helmets are fitted out with sensors to record every touch. Clean up boxing now.