Category: Olympics

Boxing champion who won two world heavyweight titles, decades apart, and took on Muhammad Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle

To be classed as a great heavyweight boxer it is often said that a fighter needs to duel with the best combatants of his time. George Foreman, who has died aged 76, unquestionably did that, having had epic world heavyweight title rivalries in the 1970s with Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, beating the latter to win the world heavyweight title in 1973.

However, in some ways his more deserving claim to greatness was an astonishing comeback that saw him become the oldest world heavyweight champion two decades later.

• Algerian tells ITV News she plans to defend Paris title
• Khelif says Trump comments ‘do not intimidate me’

Imane Khelif has said she is looking forward to defending her Olympic title in Los Angeles, and will not be intimidated by the United States president, Donald Trump.

The 25-year-old Algerian boxer, who won gold amid controversy and huge media attention at the Paris Olympics last year, has signalled her intention to repeat the feat in 2028 and hit back after Trump wrongly claimed she was transgender in August.

• Thomas Bach criticises ‘fake news campaign from Russia’
• Two boxers under scrutiny won gold in Paris

A gender row involving two female boxers at the Paris 2024 Olympics was the result of a Russian fake news campaign and had little to do with reality, the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, said on Saturday.
Bach, who is stepping down in June after 12 years in the biggest job in world sports, said the IOC had needed to fight off many similar campaigns before and after the Paris Games.
The boxing competition in the Paris was run by the IOC after it stripped the International Boxing Association (IBA) of recognition last year over its failure to implement reforms on governance and finance. But the IBA, run by the Russian businessman Umar Kremlev with close links to the Kremlin, accused the IOC during the Games of allowing two female athletes, who had been banned by the IBA after a chromosome test a year earlier, to compete.

A war of words ensued between the two organisations and dominated the headlines during the Games. “I would not consider this [Paris Games gender controversy] a real crisis because all this discussion is based on a fake news campaign coming from Russia,” Bach said at the southern Greek seaside resort where his successor will be elected on Thursday. “This was part of the many, many fake news campaigns we had to face from Russia before Paris and after Paris.”

Several such campaigns happened before Paris, including what the IOC said at the time were repeated hacking attempts. Bach said the dispute over the boxers would have been a non-issue were it not for the IBA, given the two boxers had competed for years, including at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, with no problems.

“It [the dispute] has nothing to do with the reality. These two female focuses were born as women, they were raised as women, they have been competing as women, they have been winning and losing as every other person.” The two boxers, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, won gold medals in their weight classes.

The IOC does not have a universal rule on the participation of transgender athletes or athletes with differences of sexual development (DSD), with each federation drawing up its own regulations. Russian athletes competed as neutrals in Paris after the Russian Olympic Committee was suspended for conducting Olympic elections in Ukrainian territories occupied after the Russian invasion in 2022.

Scottish amateur boxer who won an Olympic gold medal but dismissed fighting professionally as being ‘all work and wages’

When the Scottish boxer Dick McTaggart flew back from the 1956 Olympic Games in Australia, where he had won the gold medal in the lightweight division, nothing could have prepared him for the hero’s welcome he was given after travelling by train back to his home in Dundee. He was lifted on to the platform by two fellow boxers and carried out of the station, where he was besieged by hordes of well-wishers before being borne in an open-topped vehicle to his tenement home in the tough Dens Road area of the city, with fans lining the two-mile route.

McTaggart, who has died aged 89, remembered it all clearly in old age, even after dementia had begun to dim his recall of more recent events. “It was fantastic. Tears were running down my face,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. Peter Cain and John McVicar hoisted me on to their shoulders, then carried me up the stairs and out of the station. People were on the street all the way back to my home.”