C K Wu would like to see Olympic boxing without headguards ©Getty Images

On August 2 1980, Teófilo Stevenson, the brilliant Cuban heavyweight, and 10 other boxers, five of them Cuban, won Olympic gold medals at Moscow’s Olympiski Sports Complex.

Three-and-a-half decades later, will the two male athletes who climb into the ring for the opening bout of the Rio 2016 boxing tournament be the first Olympic boxers to compete without headguards since that day in the Russian capital that sent the Soviet-era crowd home with La Bayamesa, the Cuban national anthem, ringing in their ears?

We should know more after completion of next month’s World Boxing Championships in Doha.

According to C K Wu, President of AIBA, the International Boxing Association, observers from the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s medical department, as well as AIBA’s Medical and Scientific Commissions, will be on hand in Qatar to study the action.

Headguards were not used in boxing at this year's European Games in Baku
Headguards were not used in boxing at this year's European Games in Baku ©Getty Images

Speaking from the Junior World Championships in St Petersburg, the AIBA President disclosed that instances of concussion in boxing competitions had been “zero” at both the recent European Games in Baku and the Pan American Games in Toronto.

This was also the case at last year’s Asian Games in Incheon.

All three of these men’s tournaments were conducted headguard-free.

As for cuts, perhaps the most obvious counter-argument as to why headguards might be retained, Wu said there were a total of 23 in Baku and just nine in Toronto.

The AIBA President explained that he would also prefer, in time, to have headguards removed from women’s and youth boxing competitions.

He suggested that the period after next year’s Rio Games might bring proposals on how to achieve this.

"We need to do it step by step,” he said.

Next month’s World Championships, to be staged from October 5 to 15 at the Ali bin Hamad Al Attiya Arena, will be the 18th since the inaugural event in 1974 in Havana and the first in the Middle East.

They will be the second in succession to dispense with headguards, following Almaty 2013.




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