In an interview with the Associated Press, AIBA President Ching-Kuo Wu has addressed some of the issues following the Olympic Games in Rio.
Last week, AIBA expelled a number of judges from the games who they say were involved in a 'handful' of fights which did not meet the expected level of officiating.
From an Irish perspective, one of those fights was undoubtedly Michael Conlan's bantamweight quarter-final loss to Russian Vladimir Nikitin.
Both Irish fans and Conlan were enraged by the result which disgracefully saw the Belfast boxer lose by unanimous decision.
Asked for his opinion regarding the bout Wu mostly referenced Conlan's behaviour after the fight rather than the result. He also said that 'disciplinary action will follow'.
He immediately showed his finger to the referee-judges. The IOC says this is totally unacceptable. You cannot humiliate people. They are officials. He put himself in a difficult position, I can tell you. A lot of disciplinary action will follow. You should show proper behavior. If you are not happy about the result, you cannot humiliate in public our referee-judges. That has already drawn a lot of people's attention who want to punish him, so we are going to have a disciplinary commission for the case. ... You can go through the right channel to say, 'OK, may I have the chance to really review this bout?' We do have the ability to review. This bout particularly, with his behavior that drew a lot of attention, we wanted to review whether it's correct or not. ... Judges have no intentions. Why do (you think) they hate your country? The judges, why do they want it in favor of this (country) over the other one? There's no reason. But since that happened, we want to totally review our system, how to improve in our mind. Maybe five judges will score all fights, and all scores will be open. No more computer selection. I proposed these changes to our referee-judge management. We look at five and select three by computer, only showing the three. Maybe in the future we should change it to all five judges all showing, nothing to hide. It will be transparent. We will continue to work to make it in a more perfect condition.
In his interview with RTÉ after the fight, Conlan said he will never box for AIBA again. How disciplinary action would work is hard to understand.
The night previous to Conlan's elimination, there was an even more shocking result - Russian Evgeny Tishchenko's unanimous decision win against Kazakhstan's Vassily Levit.
Despite virtually everyone watching - bar the judges - thinking that Levit was the rightful winner, Wu feels there was 'nothing wrong' with the decision.
When we were sitting and watching, I felt in my mind, nothing wrong. Nothing wrong. But the next day, suddenly it becomes a very controversial issue. It was really surprising. Even Thomas Bach and I, we were sitting and watching, and I think we all clapped hands for the winner, because in our mind, sport is sport. Respecting the judges' judgment is very important. If we always wanted to change (results), then why do we have the judges? They are all highly qualified through our process of examination. For me, there's nothing to see that is intentional. We have five judges, with three judges' scores being taken randomly by computer, and the three scores that were selected and shown, I think, were fine. (But) because it's causing so many people concern, we did ask the referee-judges commission chairman, the discipline chairman, the evaluator, all were asked to review the video and see if there's something really obviously (wrong). But after viewing this, they all agree it is correct. We can even open this video to the media, to the public, and let everybody see. So this is open, nothing to hide. I just want to emphasize it: This is a subjective judging sport.
Picture credit: Sportsfile
