(FEB 19) Carolina Álvarez of El
Guarataro (Venezuela) is thinking of dropping down to junior
flyweight (48.98 kg), reports Leonardo Duque Rivero of
Meridiano. According
to her trainer, Andrés Montañez, “she comes into the gym for her
daily workout each evening weighing 51 kilos and ends the
session at 50. This is true of no other fighter. She’s giving
away weight every time she fights, whereas with the right
preparation she could easily make 48 kilos. At junior flyweight,
she’d be faster and hit harder. All the same, we’ll have to wait
to see what those who manage her career in Germany have to say
on the subject. Ultimately, it’s their decision”.
If she gets the green light, the
plan is then to go after the junior flyweight title before
seeking a rematch with Susi Kentikian, who stopped her – a
ridiculous stoppage in her view – on the 16th
February 2007. “I don’t understand why he (referee Mark Nelson)
stopped the fight,” said Álvarez on that occasion. “Nothing was
happening. She hadn’t hit me. I was absolutely fine.” The
Venezuelan was behind on the scorecards and had a heavily
bleeding nose at the time, but believed that the Armenian was
tiring and that she stood a chance of stopping her in the
remaining three and a half minutes.
“You have to remember this is
women’s boxing,” explained José Ignacio Martínez, the Spanish
judge, who was supervising the fight. “If it had been a men’s
title fight, perhaps things would have been different.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t the right
moment,” added the Panamanian judge, Medardo Villalobos, “but if
he hadn’t stopped it and there’d been a knockout, worse might
have happened. He did it for her protection.”
But according to Boxrec, Kentikian
has only scored one knockout in 19 professional
outings, whereas there are male boxers who score one virtually
every time they take to the ring. If, then, as Villalobos
claims, the point of stopping a fight is to prevent a knockout,
you would think it would be the men’s fights they stopped as
soon as there were a nose bleed, not the women’s. The logic of
the one argument, in other words, defeats that of the other.
Perhaps the term ‘logic’, here, is
inapposite. You can’t help noticing, watching boxing, that it’s
seldom the fighters, but disturbingly often the officials, that
display symptoms of brain damage. There was a case earlier this
month where a fight scheduled for ten rounds – (that, the
supervisor is adamant, is what had been agreed; that is what it
said on the poster; and that was what had been announced in the
centre of the ring before the fight began) – was stopped at the
end of the eighth because one corner, without warning and
without adducing a scrap of evidence, suddenly claimed that the
contract they had signed had been for eight.
Well you can’t blame them for
trying, I suppose, if their girl was exhausted, but should the
officials really have bought it? Would you?
Sources:
Meridiano,
Líder en deportes
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Comment from WBAN: Susi Kentikian's Official Boxing Record
is 19-0-0 (14KO). In her fights she is credited with one KO (as
mentioned in Ewan's report), and also has 13 TKO's in
which if the fight had not been stopped the fight would in all
likelihood have resulted in a KO. This comment is
written by Sue TL Fox
