Boxing is under scrutiny again and rightfully so. The sport’s dangers have been highlighted recently after pro boxer Nick Blackwell suffered a bleed on his skull during a British title fight against Chris Eubank Jr. After the fight, Blackwell collapsed in the ring and was induced into a coma which lasted for almost a week. Even long-time sports fan and writer Simon Barnes is beginning to find the sport hard to stomach.
So it is quite infuriating to sit back and watch the International Boxing Association (AIBA) lobby for the sport’s top professional athletes to be allowed to square-off with amateurs at the Olympic Games — possibly as early as Rio this summer. They hope it will add more glitz and glamour to Olympic boxing. The premise for the proposal may sound sensible, but it is the wrong way to go about jazzing up the Olympic sport. It could also be incredibly dangerous.
Interviewed on television for his 80th birthday in 1959, E.M. Forster said that one of the reasons he was so fond of King’s College, Cambridge, where he had lived as a Fellow since 1946, was ‘a very precious tradition, that the old people and the young can meet here very easily and without self-consciousness’. In
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