Loss by Top Flyweight Sends U.S. Boxers Reeling

Rick Bowme/Associated Press

Warren was inconsolable afterward, falling into the arms of a USA Boxing publicist. Between sobs, he said, “I lost, I want to go home,” and twice paused an interview to wipe tears from his eyes. Warren, 21, the only returning boxer from the 2004 Olympics, passed up a potentially lucrative professional career after his first-round light flyweight loss in Athens in an effort to fulfill his promise to his mother, Paulette, of placing a gold medal around her neck. His future, like his team’s, is in flux.

Once a boxing superpower, the United States has had a turbulent few months, with Warren’s loss ranking as perhaps the most disappointing moment of its time here. Coach Dan Campbell said Tuesday night that the bizarre circumstances surrounding the outcome of Warren’s match, which he said was scored unfairly, threatened to dent the confidence of the remaining boxers.

“I think they will most definitely be psyched out,” Campbell said. “We have a psychologist around, and we’re going to make sure she’ll talk to the team. I’m sure all of them are going to be psyched out by this.”

As of Wednesday morning here, three boxers — Shawn Estrada, Demetrius Andrade and Raynell Williams — had won their first matches. Two others, the heavyweight Deontay Wilder and the light flyweight Luis Yanez, were scheduled to box later in the day. Like Warren, Andrade won a world championship in November. Williams and Wilder have favorable draws.

Even so, the United States appears on its way to more Olympic boxing frustrations. Despite winning 108 boxing medals over all in Olympic competition, 20 more than second-place Russia, the team has won only six in the last two Games and only two gold medals since 1996 in Atlanta. The count has declined by two — from six to four to two — every year since then.

“From the beginning, we’ve felt that if we could come away with two, three, four medals, that we’d feel very good about it, and that hasn’t changed,” said Jim Millman, the chief executive of USA Boxing. “But there’s no question that this has been a discouraging couple of days.”

It started Friday morning when the bantamweight Gary Russell Jr., also a medal favorite, collapsed in a desperate final effort to make weight and was disqualified. It continued Sunday and Monday, when Javier Molina and Sadam Ali were defeated handily in their Olympic debuts. And it reached its peak Tuesday when Warren, who fell behind by a point with about 55 seconds remaining, presumed he was winning until the final 15 seconds. He then realized he needed to stop dancing around the edge of the ring and start throwing punches.

Warren explained that he thought he heard the crowd imploring him to move, to stay away from Lee. Campbell said he did not know why Warren stopped punching and that his pleas for him to be more aggressive might not have been heard above the din. Warren said he thought he registered a clean hook just before the final bell and retreated to the corner, expecting to hear good news. He did not.

“You mean I lost?” Warren said to Campbell.

“Yeah,” Campbell said.

Disgusted, Warren tossed his mouthpiece and his headgear, congratulated Lee, the 2005 world flyweight champion, then stood glumly as the referee, Peter Dorko of Hungary, raised Lee’s arm in victory.

“I feel like it wasn’t the right scoring because I worked so hard for this,” said Warren, the first United States boxer to compete in consecutive Olympics since Davey Lee Armstrong in 1972 and 1976. “To come in this far and lose in the first round, it ain’t right. It doesn’t seem real to me.”

• The bout was tied after each of the first three rounds, even though Campbell and Warren suggested in separate interviews that they felt it should not have been. Campbell recalled two specific instances when Lee registered a point within a second or two of Warren’s scoring one, which Campbell said he considered suspicious. Millman said he did not believe there was a mechanism to lodge a formal protest, but a spokesman for the International Amateur Boxing Association said a country could do so within an hour of the close of a session.
• Earlier Tuesday, Ukraine lost a protest that it had filed after one of its fighters was defeated by a Chinese boxer. A British fighter also complained about the scoring in his loss to a Chinese opponent, claiming the judges favored the host country.

“I don’t know what to say about this one,” Campbell said. “I’m almost speechless. Some things you don’t ever want to say, so I won’t. But it was just weird the way the scoring went.”

Before every session, a computer draw determines the referee and the five judges who will officiate each fight. A competition jury examines the draw to make sure there is no conflict of interest among the nations selected and that each boxer is represented by the same number of judges from his particular region or continent. In Warren’s fight, the officials were from Argentina, Botswana, Russia, Thailand and Tunisia.

After a series of controversial decisions marred the 1988 competition in Seoul, South Korea, the International Amateur Boxing Association recommended that the old system, which relied more on subjective elements, be replaced by an electronic method to at least diminish the possibility for favoritism and corruption. In this new system, instituted in time for the 1992 Games in Barcelona, Spain, five judges sit ringside in front of a keypad wired to a terminal.

Whenever they decide a scoring punch is landed, they press a red or blue button, depending on the color of the boxer’s jersey, to score the point. As soon as one judge pushes a button, a window of 1.2 seconds opens for the others to join in. A point is scored only if at least three judges press the button within that span.

“I thought the fight was extremely close, and I think the judges were quite close with their decisions,” said Terry Smith, the chairman of the A.I.B.A. referee and judging commission who is one of two technical delegates overseeing the Olympic officiating. “There was nobody who was a clear winner, I can assure you that.”