BoxingScene Roundtable: Olympic boxing memories

With the 2024 Paris Olympic Games boxing tournament starting today, BoxingScene staff writers reflect on some of their outstanding memories from previous Olympics.

Jason Langendorf

As an American of a certain age, all my patriotic boxing-related Olympic memories come from Muhammad Ali lighting the torch in Atlanta in ‘96 or from black-and-white photos. Kind of a bummer.

And yet I’m always excited to be given an excuse to talk about Eddie Eagan.

Eagan was basically a pre-Marvel superhero, a truly self-made man who served in both World Wars, put himself through Yale and then Harvard law, and in 1920 won the light heavyweight gold medal at the Antwerp Games. Cool, right? That’s only the half of it.

In 1932, Eagan, by then 34 and running his own law practice, was contacted by a friend who was the head of the Olympic Bobsled Committee. Would Eddie, who had never been on a bobsled in his life, like to join the team? Yes. Of course he would.

So Eagan climbed aboard for the first time at Lake Placid, hurtled down the chute to a win and became the first (and remains the only) athlete to win gold at a Summer and Winter Games in two different events. Superheroes: They don’t build ‘em like they used to.

Manouk Akopyan

Growing up as an eighties baby in Los Angeles, my first memory of the Olympics was during the 1992 Barcelona Games. As a basketball fan, I gravitated toward watching the legendary Dream Team squad. But my father always had boxing on our television set throughout my youth, and that’s when I was first introduced to Oscar De La Hoya, a prodigy from East LA who went on to win the gold medal for the USA and started his storybook career as The Golden Boy. 

For the 1996 Atlanta Games, my father and I sat in the living room watching Muhammad Ali take the flame and light the Olympic cauldron during the opening ceremony. My dad told me how he would listen to Ali fights on the radio back home in Armenia. He was a big George Foreman fan but explained to me how Ali was “The Greatest” and then popped in the “Champions Forever” VHS tape from his collection to prove it. Little did we know then that Floyd Mayweather Jr. would emerge from those Olympics as the next greatest for his generation.

My father passed the proverbial torch of boxing fandom to me before passing away in 2022 at the age 73. He’ll always remain my gold standard. 

And now, I’ll watch the Summer Olympics this year as a first-time father with my seven-month-old daughter, who was appropriately born last winter on Boxing Day.

Eric Raskin 

I tend to watch the Olympics through Americentric eyes, focusing on which U.S. boxers may medal and propel themselves toward professional stardom here in my home country. But no excessive degree of focus on American fighters could obscure how utterly dazzling Vasiliy Lomachenko was as he tore through the featherweight competition as a 20-year-old in 2008. That was the last Olympics I tracked closely — I watched every single bout aired that summer and wrote about it for ESPN and vowed “never again” because the scoring system had sucked almost every ounce of action out of Olympic boxing. 

But Loma was the exception to the rule of how dreadfully dull the competition had become. You knew instantly you were watching a special boxer as that year’s Val Barker Trophy winner breezed through his five bouts by a combined score of 58-13.

Bernard Neequaye

The Olympic Games is one of the most cherished multi-sport competitions in Ghana. Boxing, on the other hand, remains the country’s surest bet at winning medals in such prestigious championships.

Prior to the 2020 Tokyo games, Ghana had failed to win an Olympic medal in boxing since the late Prince Amartey took bronze in Munch 1972. Samuel Takyi, a featherweight boxer, who was a surprise inclusion in Team Ghana having qualified to the games on his first attempt, made history when he ended the nation’s 29-year Olympics medal drought in Tokyo.

Despite going more than 49 years without a boxing medal at the Olympics, Ghana’s last medal at the games before the 2020 Tokyo edition was a bronze medal by the soccer team in Barcelona in 1992.

The then 20-year-old joined Ghanaian Olympic greats Clement Quartey, a light welterweight who won silver in Rome 1960, Eddie Blay a bronze light welterweight medalist from Tokyo 1964 and Prince Amartey who made history in Munch 1972 as Ghana’s only boxing medalists at the Olympics.

Takyi’s win was Team Ghana’s only medal feat at the games in Tokyo — an achievement which added to the country’s proud history in the sport. 

Declan Warrington

Audley Harrison winning gold at Sydney 2000. If you were born in 1989 you were old enough to really enjoy the Olympics, and young enough to not view the highest-profile events with cynical eyes.

If you were born in 1989 and you were in London, the time difference also meant late nights and early mornings that elevated the sense of occasion. It was also a time when Harrison’s fellow Briton Lennox Lewis, himself an Olympic gold medallist, was the world’s leading professional heavyweight and at his peak, and when Harrison’s success therefore seemed to promise so much. 

The story of Harrison, who seemed the lone ranger determined to win for his country — and a less divided one than it is today — grew in profile as the Olympics progressed. His professional career not delivering in quite the same way shouldn’t come close to mattering — the legacy of his gold medal is so much of the success Britain’s amateur boxers have had since.

Tom Ivers

I remember watching Anthony Joshua and Luke Campbell win gold and got my dad to take me to the boxing gym the very next day… best decision I ever made!

Tris Dixon

The injustice around Roy Jones in 1988 stands out, with the subsequent admission that Jones clearly deserved gold when he was awarded the Val Barker trophy. However, like Raskin, I’ve viewed the Olympics through a national lens for most of my life. I was thrilled when Robin Reid won bronze in 1992, remember every step of the Audley Harrison journey and was in a supermarket car park listening to Amir Khan face Mario Kindelan in the Athens final of 2004 on the radio. 

But maybe the UK medal haul of 2008 in Beijing was my favorite, in that Team GB made such an impression and, really, it was credit to Audley winning gold in Sydney that laid the financial foundations and funding for future years and the success that has followed through the next two decades.

Kieran Mulvaney 

Every four years, I find myself wondering what it would be like to cover an Olympics.

There was no time that I felt that more strongly than 2012. The excitement and energy of the spectators at the ExCel Arena was palpable thousands of miles away as Anthony Joshua took super-heavyweight gold by the slimmest of margins.

I didn’t know it was possible for amateur boxing to have such raucous crowds. So what if there was controversy over the scoring and the sense that Joshua had maybe gotten a hometown decision in two of his four bouts, including the final? There was a sense that, in Joshua, British boxing had one of its biggest stars in years, and so it would prove.