Tokyo, Aug 5: Albert Batyrgaziev became the first professional boxer to win an Olympic gold medal on Thursday when the 23-year-old Russian conquered the featherweight division by beating Duke Ragan, a fellow pro.
And though Batyrgaziev knows he made history and both of these fighters greatly boosted their pro careers with Olympic success, he thinks the distinction between professional and Olympic boxing is weak — and getting weaker.
“I think that being here for any athlete means that it’s a professional or a near-professional experience,” Batyrgaziev said through an interpreter.
“A professional boxer is not only someone who does it full-time (for money). It also means that here at these Games, any athlete can consider himself or herself a professional.”
Batyrgaziev and Ragan became the first two professional boxers to meet in a Games final at the Kokugikan Arena.
Batyrgaziev, who is 3-0 as a pro boxer, escaped with a 3:2 victory by employing a strategy that was much more Olympic than his American opponent’s approach.
Batyrgaziev, a teenage kickboxing champion from Dagestan who picked up boxing just five years ago, pressured Ragan from the opening bell in the final.
He largely dominated the first round with aggression and high punch volume — the two traditional keys to persuading amateur judges.
Meanwhile, Ragan needed nearly half of the three-round fight to find his game. The 4-0 pro knows his approach is more typical to the professional game, where more rounds allow more counterpunching and more gradual buildups to action.
“I feel like his conditioning won him the fight,” Ragan said.
The 23-year-old from Cincinnati spoke throughout the tournament about his struggle to override his professional mentality in time to win these brief bouts.
Ragan learned he was headed to the Olympics only in early June when the Boxing Task Force overseeing the Tokyo tournament finalized its qualification processes.
He became the 12th U.S. medalist in the featherweight division, and he wouldn’t change his career path.
Pros have been allowed to qualify for the past two Olympics, and the three pros who competed poorly in Rio de Janeiro have been followed by more than 40 in Tokyo.
The pros have again failed to dominate — in fact, the most experienced professionals in the field have all been eliminated without medals.
Now that Batyrgaziev and Ragan have finished the Olympic portions of their careers with the two biggest medals, bigger paydays are in store — and even better, they’ve now got a history.
Nobody left in the Tokyo field has more than the eight pro fights of Uzbek super heavyweight Bakhodir Jalolov, who fights USA Boxing’s Richard Torrez Jr. for the gold medal in the final fight of the Games on Sunday. (AP)
