The 42 Editor’s note: This article by Gavin Cooney forms part of The 42′s subscriber-only coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympics, with unique insights and fresh perspectives on the biggest stories every single day. If you’d enjoy more great sportswriting like this, you can sign up here for a free one-month trial to The 42.
THE ANNOUNCER YELLED rouge but still boxing will not be flushed with embarrassment.
What hope has a sport so stubbornly resistant to self-awareness as this?
Daina Moorehouse strode into the lions’ den in Paris, booed as she arrived to fight France’s Wassile Lkhardiri in front of a raucous, thirsty crowd. But at first Moorehouse was impervious and then she was imperious as, to use an old Michale Conlan quote, she boxed the ears off Lkhardiri.
The first warning sign was that Moorehouse only took the first round 3-2 on the judges’ cards. She had utterly dominated it and yet could only earn a split call. It was at that point that Zaur Antia knew what was coming. Daina Moorehouse had been slapped with a hometown tariff so punishing that her only path into the quarter-finals was via knockout.
Moorehouse continued to control the second round, unloading flurries up close while also managing to stay out of range, rippling her opponent’s face with one punch so clean it sent her staggering backwards. The judges promptly gave Lkhardiri the round, 4-1.
Worse was to come in the final round. Moorehouse continued to box smartly but she also inflicted some hurt, scrambling Lkhardiri’s brain to the point she once looked to the Irish corner for instruction. Moorehouse finished with a brutal final flurry that put an exclamation point on her night’s work.
And yet.
The judges scored the final round 4-1 to the French girl, and Moorehouse lost on all but one of the cards. The judges from Kazakhstan, Russia, and Canada scored it 29-28 to Lkhardiri, while the Azeri judge scored it 30-27, meaning he scored every round against Moorehouse.
The Irish corner erupted in rage, waving his hands to the crowd to dismiss the verdict while also gesturing angrily at the sky. The Irish boxers in the crowd waved their arms too, but nobody was listening.
“A disgrace,” fumed one member of the Irish delegation, as another shouted that “they are destroying the Olympics”.
“You watch boxing?”, Zaur Antia asked the press, rhetorically. “Anyone with eyes could see it was 5-0 every round but I knew after it was 3-2 in the first round.” He then strode off, flinging his arms in the air in that strange mixture of resigned seething to which he has been driven too often in his time with Ireland.
Moorehouse took a few minutes before speaking to the media, and she cut a figure of almost abnormal calm. Perhaps we are all at the point of resignation now.
“I didn’t feel like when I was in there that I was losing,” she said. “When you know you’re getting beaten you’re getting beaten, but I definitely didn’t feel like I was losing.
“I knew they were going to boo me. I knew there would have been screams for her but I just knew if I performed and took it out of the judges’ hands that I would have got the decision.
“I still did perform but didn’t take it out of the judges’ hands.
“I definitely feel like I didn’t take any big shots, even the shots I did take were just stupid jabs or like a stupid little hook over the top.
“But, I don’t know, I definitely thought I was landing the harder shots. I was the busier boxer.
“I pushed on in that third round thinking surely I have this. I just went for it but I think I lost the third round 4-1.”
The team’s high performance director, Tricia Heberle, sidled over to stand by Moorehouse with tears forming in her eyes.
“What did you see today?”, she asked us. “You have been watching boxing a long, long time. I am nothing but proud of this athlete. She completely controlled that fight. She moved the boxer around, she found openings, made great punches: head punches, body punches, combinations. That’s what I saw. I am extremely proud of her.”
She then confirmed that Ireland have no mechanism by which they can lodge a complaint about judging.
Last night’s decision against Aoife O’Rourke was questionable, as were refereeing calls during Grainne Walsh’s defeat earlier in the week. Anger then was leavened by the fact that neither O’Rourke nor Walsh performed to their capability, but Moorehouse could not have done any more.
Boxing is fighting for its place at the LA Games in 2028, and its potential exclusion from the programme would be a disaster for Irish sport and the people and communities served by boxing.
But the Games’ great recidivists are at it again. Rio was supposed to be the nadir from which things would improve. The IOC cut out the IBA and arranged boxing themselves, and while Tokyo marked an improvement, this was the wretched stuff of nights we have seen too often before.
This wasn’t even Lkhardiri’s first larceny against Moorehouse, which came at the European Games last year. Antia was left furiously remonstrating with the judges and referee on that occasion, too.
“I don’t know”, said Moorehouse when asked what tonight means for boxing’s hopes of being an Olympic sport beyond next weekend.
“I actually don’t know what to say. Some judging is okay, some judging is not. Some referees are just… I think you definitely have to take a look at the judges and the refs.”
That is boxing’s quadrennial refrain.
We might not hear it in Los Angeles, though, because there may be no boxers left to sing it.
Written by Gavin Cooney and originally published on The 42 whose award-winning team produces original content that you won’t find anywhere else: on GAA, League of Ireland, women’s sport and boxing, as well as our game-changing rugby coverage, all with an Irish eye. Subscribe here.
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