Amateur Boxing is Still Blighted By Dodgy Judges

Billy Joe Saunders and Joe Murray, two of the brilliant young pups in this Great Britain boxing squad, no doubt saw red when poor judging undermined their efforts this week. But did the errant judges see only red as well?

Saunders, frustrated today by the outstanding Cuban Carlos Banteaux Suarez when within sight of a quarter-final place, will hardly be consoled by a new report which suggests judges in all sports have a subconscious bias towards competitors wearing red kit.

The 18-year-old welterweight, who lost 13-6 to a man he beat on a 26-26 count back earlier in the year, boxed out of the blue corner – as did Murray yesterday, when he lost 17-7 to the Chinese bantamweight Yu Gu, whom he had beaten 14-11 to win bronze at the world championships in Chicago last November.

Neither British boxer was worried about the color of his vest, however, as red and blue corners are awarded randomly. They were more concerned with the inability of the judges to hit their buttons in unison when they clearly landed scoring punches that everyone else in the 12,000-seater stadium could plainly see. So, what to make of scoring that causes such regular disquiet, and the alleged benefit of drawing the red corner, not blue, in boxing tournaments?

First the color theory. Norbert Hagemann, Bernd Strauss and Jan Leibing, German psychologists at the University of Munster, analyzed the split-second reactions of referees in 42 taekwondo matches. They showed referees the same matches, with the red and blue uniforms digitally swapped – and found the bias was 13% in favor of red. "Points awarded seemed to increase after the blue athlete was digitally transformed into a red athlete and decreased when the red competitor changed to blue," they reported. "Referees' decisions will 'tip the scales' when athletes are relatively well-matched but have relatively small influence when one is clearly superior." However, the theory is not holding up at these Games. Up to the end of yesterday's round, there were 60 winners out of the red corner and 62 out of the blue.

The more serious issue is the method of electronic scoring. It baffles newcomers to the sport, makes supporters angry and frustrates the competitors. So, why use it? It was introduced at the fifth AIBA world championships in Moscow in 1989 "to make judges' officiating more objective" – which is tantamount to conceding there was skulduggery afoot before then. It was a common complaint under the old system that judges from allied regions favored each other's boxers – or not, when there were outbreaks of jealousy in the sport's international governing body.

The 1988 Seoul Olympics was the last straw for many, particularly after Roy Jones Jr was blatantly denied a medal in his final against the South Korean Park Si-hun. What looked like robbery there, is said to have been payback for the perceived injustices against Kim Dong-kil, loser to the American Jerry Page in Los Angeles four years earlier. It was plain such tit-for-tat nonsense could not continue.

But the transparency for which AIBA has been searching since remains elusive. They have tried, no doubt, and the posting of scores, punch by punch, on giant screens on each side of the ring in the stadium certainly keeps the crowd up to speed on the progress of the combatants, adding to the excitement and informing the boxers how much they might have left to do. But with the openness comes revelation – and what we are left to see too regularly is incompetence by officials, many of them not so young any more, who cannot agree on what is in front of them quickly enough.

The system works like this: three of the five ringside judges have to register a score for a boxer "instantaneously", according to the AIBA rules, for it to count. Two registers, even for a punch that might flatten the other boxer, go unrewarded. For all its renewed popularity – amateur boxing is making healthy inroads back into the state education system in the UK and there will be huge interest in the sport in 2012, given the wealth of talent coming through – the scoring remains the bugbear.

Billy Joe Saunders and Joe Murray are young and enthusiastic enough to overcome such setbacks. But they will not be encouraged to stay in the sport if they suffer many more such inconsistencies between now and the London Olympics. The opponents they fought deserved their wins, but the denial of legitimate scoring points early in a bout affects a boxer's strategy and, in the short space of an amateur contest, there is often not enough time to redress the balance. Each of the British losers was reduced to abandoning his practiced and efficient style while going for a late stoppage.

Amateur boxing's emphasis, especially in the lighter weights, is on clean, visible scoring. The methodology of recording the score inadvertently mitigates against skillful all-round boxing, as it discourages body punching, much harder to see from ringside. And, as we have seen, it often results in desperation brawling at the end of a fight. The upside of the progressive tallying of the scores is a spectacle filled with shifting drama. But, as Saunders and Murray have learnt, not every story is a fairytale.