Olympics: Pommel and Pummel

Munich in 1972 was a watershed Games. Staged in more or less the same time zone as the UK, I was able to watch most of the action live as it happened. The Beeb’s theme music of jaunty Bavarian yodelling is as fresh in my head now as it sounded then.

While Mark Spitz’s seven swimming golds and the excitement on the athletics track inevitably hogged my attention, the UK TV audience in the first week fell in love with a bunch of astonishingly supple teenage girls performing extraordinary acrobatics. And it was all perfectly legal. I’m referring, of course, to Gymnastics.

During the Seventies, my own experience of the school gym left me with lasting mental scars.  I’m sure the Moscow and Bucharest training camps left their pupils with more than the occasional rope burn or acrophobia atop the climbing frame, but the regime yielded results which won over all bar the most vehement anti-Communists. While Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci stole the show with their cute smiles and historic ‘perfect ten’ scores, my favourites had to be the Soviet pair, Ludmila Tourischeva and Nelli Kim. In Munich and Montreal, as grand old ladies in their early twenties, even I was captivated by their grace and gravity-defying somersaults. Since then, I have gradually become immune to the charms of a sport which relies heavily on facial expressions and music to win over judges. Apart from a springier carpet for the Floor exercises, little has changed in the intervening four decades but not even the crowd-pleasing Simone Biles or the success of Britain’s Beth Tweddle will make me watch women’s gymnastics nowadays.

In contrast, I haven’t completely lost my fascination with the feats of strength exhibited by the toned blokes on the Rings, High Bar or Pommel Horse. Vitaly Scherbo scooped six golds at Barcelona and Alexei Nemov was such a brilliant all-rounder in Sydney but it was the Japanese men in the Seventies who first won my admiration. They weren’t built like hammer throwers but the sculpted muscles required to execute those routines on the Rings were incredible. Others were so good on a single apparatus that their names remain associated with particular moves decades later. The Tkachev on the High Bar and Magyar on the Pommel Horse resonate today, but it was amazing to witness the original Hungarian’s minute of magic in Montreal.

While gymnastics is still an immensely popular ingredient in the first week’s schedules, boxing provides a counterpoint to the athletics programme in the second. I was never so attracted to boxing that I eagerly anticipated the early rounds. It really all boiled down to that lengthy succession of finals on the very last day of competition. With the athletics programme completed, these days I just find the boxing finale a terrible anti-climax to the previous fortnight of sporting endeavour, drama and excitement. It wasn’t always so. 

I remember ‘our’ Chris Finnegan being lauded for his Middleweight title in Mexico City more than fifty years ago but Britain had a long wait for our next Olympic champion. In the interim, we had to make do with various plucky semi-finalists like light-middleweights Alan Minter (1972), Richie Woodhall (1988) and Robin Reid (1992) and our bantamweight Pat Cowdell in ’76. In the same year, light-welterweight Clinton McKenzie may well have joined them had he not been drawn against the incomparable shimmying Sugar Ray Leonard in the third round.

The blatant result-fixing at Seoul was an Olympic low-point. Both the sport and the Games themselves were brought into disrepute by South Korean officials physically attacking a referee and a defeated home nation bantamweight, presumably assured that he was certain to be awarded victory, refusing to leave his chair in the ring even when the arena’s lights were switched off. Actually, that was quite funny. 

The running points-for-punches tally was in my opinion far superior, especially for the TV spectator, and the opportunity for retrospective cheating amongst judges was eliminated. When the powers-that-be switched to the pro-style ‘ten point round’ format in Rio it created more corruption than ever. The adjudication process, number and length of rounds and headgear may change but there have been some cracking Olympic fights, stories and personalities over the years.

I haven’t necessarily watched them. Had I but known that the Spinks brothers would become so well known, perhaps I would have paid more attention to their triumphs at Montreal. The same is true of the super-heavy crunch between Riddick Bowe and the then-Canadian Lennox Lewis at Seoul which Lewis won in a dodgy stoppage decision. The two have hated each other ever since.

Of course, that pair went on to extraordinarily lucrative careers, as did Ukraine’s Wladimir Klitschko, a champion in Atlanta, and Oscar de la Hoya, in Barcelona. Evander Holyfield only won bronze in ’84, as did Floyd Mayweather twelve years later, although his semi-final defeat to a Bulgarian was hugely controversial. The biggest guys inevitably attract the biggest headlines, sprouting speculation about their potential as prospective professional world champions. The engaging but lumbering Audley Harrison looked the part at Sydney but his pro career was a disaster. In contrast, 2012 gold medallist Anthony Joshua has more than justified the hype.

While the UK media tend to fixate on their own and the Americans, I have strong memories of fights involving Cubans. As natives of Castro’s socialist republic, they were forbidden to turn pro, and so the top stars would compete in multiple Olympics. We will never know whether the great Teofilo Stevenson or Felix Savon would have rivalled Ali, Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson or the Klitschko brothers in their prime but as amateurs they reigned supreme in their respective eras. I recall seeing the smooth-as-silk Stevenson making mincemeat of US hopeful Duane Bobick in Munich and flattening John Tate at the following Games.

Savon’s ding-dong with a Russian in the final at Sydney saw him equal Stevenson’s record of three consecutive golds. Mario Kindelan only won two and, being a lightweight, was even smaller than me! I wouldn’t have fancied my chances with him in the ring, though. Unbeaten as an amateur for five years, he stood between Britain’s teenage Amir Khan and the Athens title. It was one of the last fights I watched from start to finish, engrossed not only by Khan’s amazing maturity at only 17, but also the reigning champ’s peerless quality. It wasn’t a close contest but definitely one of the most memorable Olympic bouts I’ve seen.