A French super-heavyweight boxer yesterday lashed out at an “injustice” and sat in protest on the side of the ring after he was disqualified for headbutting in the Tokyo Olympics quarter-finals.
Mourad Aliev was disqualified in the second round against Britain’s Frazer Clarke.
The 26-year-old Aliev sat beside the ring ropes afterward, seething and saying that the officials had admitted that they had made a mistake.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“I sat down to protest against the unfairness for me,” he said. “I prepared for these Games for four years... I really wanted to fight against the injustice, so that was my way to show that I don’t agree with that decision.”
“So the judges went to discuss together to know what happened,” Aliev added. “They said that I would have won — however, it was already written that I was disqualified, so the decision cannot be unmade. It was already too late.”
Aliev said that the referee had failed to give him any warning before the bout was called off.
“I was just stopped without any warning and they just told me: ‘You lost’ — just like that,” he said. “So I think it was an act of sabotage.”
Clarke, who had cuts to his eyes, called the situation “confusing.”
“The referee made his decision, that’s what he’s there to do,” Clarke said. “There’s a bunch of great referees and officials here, so you know we have to believe in what they do. I think they’ve done whatever they deemed to be correct.”
Clarke said that he told Aliev to “calm down.”
“I’ve been in these situations myself, often you’re not thinking with your head, you’re thinking with your heart and your emotions are all over the place,” Clarke added.
Controversial scoring is often a feature of Olympic boxing, but the 2016 Rio Games were especially marred by poor judging and an International Olympic Committee task force took over running the sport at the Tokyo Games to prevent a repeat.
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