• Boxing

The painfully hard world left behind by Joshua and DeGale

It is harder now to win an Olympic gold medal for a British boxer than it has been since the blank-eyed, Cold War warriors dominated the scene in the 1970s and 1980s. It was officially impossible back then!

Then, the British squad was sent out to slaughter again and again and at each Olympics in 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988 they returned cut, bloodied, concussed and clutching a bronze medal or two.

The GB squad can compete now, but it still remains a hard, hard road to Olympic glory with bits of luck and fortune necessary to transform desire into any form of precious medal.

Buncey's vaults

Audley Harrison prospered as an amateur © PA Photos

• The amateur sport in Britain was in chaos in 1998. "Later this month a breakaway federation of English club members, concerned officials and associations will meet to plan a coup to oust the six directors of the Amateur Boxing Association (ABA) of England." In Scotland and Wales "competing federations have already been set up."
• It was an ugly mess with all sorts of insurance issues and at the 1996 Olympics both the GB boxers had lost their opening contests. There was some promising news but it was not all good.
• "Even the news on Sunday that ABA champions Chris Bessey and Audley Harrison had won gold medals at a European championship qualification tournament in Venice was ruined by revelations that boxers had to pay £804.50 to take part. The European championship is a qualification tournament for the Olympics."
• "The introduction of individual payments is part of cost-cutting exercises following losses suffered by the ABA during last year's European junior championships in Birmingham, and will clearly favour boxers at wealthy clubs."
• It seems like a distant world, far, far removed from the centre of excellence and the fifty or so elite amateur boxers that are now a full-time part of the English GB system in Sheffield.
• As reported in The Daily Telegraph, March 17, 1998

Gold medal wins in Beijing in 2008 and London 2012 helped increase funding, helped get more people involved and helped make better professional boxers of the men that won the golds.

British men have won gold at three of the last four Olympics and it is fair to say that the old days are gone. A side effect of the success it that any man dreaming now of being part of next year's Olympics has absolutely no chance unless he is in the World Series Boxing (WSB), International Boxing Association (AIBA) Pro Boxing (APB) or a successful regular in the elite team.

It was not that way in 2007 when James DeGale had competition for the middleweight place on the plane to China. It was not that way in 2011 when Anthony Joshua was stopped on his feet but out of his head in the European championships. Both DeGale and Joshua had to fight for every scrap of recognition to get on the teams.

The APB is the fully professional arm of AIBA, which runs boxing and has a monopoly on Olympic competitors, and the WSB, also run by AIBA, is the boxing format caught in the middle. In old-school amateur boxing events like the Olympics, the competitors wear vests and fight for three, three-minute rounds. In the WSB the vests come off and they compete over five, three-minute rounds.

The best boxers from the WSB and the APB, where they fight over eight and 10 three-minute rounds, will qualify for Rio next year and they will dominate at the Olympic podium. The regular boxers, once known as amateurs, will qualify through the world championships or other regional events.

The men from the WSB and APB (a women's version of the WSB is being discussed) will most likely be veterans of between two and four campaigns and will have amassed impressive records over the longer distances. They will simply be too tough.

Liverpool's Sam Maxwell is 2-0 this season but ended his first season in the WSB at 1-4. He did, however, twice lose to Vasyl Lomachenko on points over five rounds. "This is going to be a long and hard road to Rio," said Maxwell, who could fight seven times in the group stages of this year's bumper WSB. Seven wins will guarantee a place in Rio.

Maxwell fights for the British Lionhearts and they have won two matches and lost two matches so far this season. Sadly, the WSB like to use the word play when discussing fixtures.

The WSB is split into two groups of eight teams and each team has a selection of boxers that compete in the 10 Olympic weights. Each week, and ending in late April, five of the Lionhearts compete either home or away in fourteen fixtures. They are in Russia this week and away to Cuba next week. It is gruesome.

So far this season the Cuba Domadores team has won all four matches and all twenty of their fights. The Cubans won the WSB last year and the team split $500,000 (£328,000), which is the prize money on offer, and managed to only suffer one defection.

In the Cuban team are the pair that lost in the Olympics to both DeGale and Joshua. Emilio Correa Bayeux managed to bite DeGale before losing a close decision in the middleweight final in Beijing; Erislandy Savon, who is unbeaten in the WSB, lost a disputed decision to Joshua by just one point before the medal stages.

In the next twelve months DeGale will get a world title shot and Joshua will show that he is a world-class fighter. I would argue that the two professionals, millionaires from their gold wins, will have an easier year than the men they left behind to battle relentlessly in the WSB, which is surely one of the hardest and most demanding tournaments in world sport.

Anthony Joshua won gold at the 2012 Olympics © PA Photos

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