U.S. OLYMPIC FESTIVAL / LOS ANGELES 1991 : Best Punches Finally to Be on the Button

For the first time at a major U.S. amateur boxing tournament, judges at the Olympic Festival this weekend and Tuesday will be scoring bouts electronically.

At the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, criticism of the judging was in the mild-to-ordinary range--until the finals.

Earlier in the tournament, South Korean boxing coaches, trainers and administrators started a riot over the refereeing in one bout.

But in the finals, when judges scored the light-flyweight gold medal bout 5-0 for Ivalio Hristov of Bulgaria over Michael Carbajal of the United States, U.S. officials were enraged. Some called it the worst Olympic decision they had seen in decades.

The judges were merely warming up.

Later, in the light-middleweight gold medal bout, Roy Jones of the United States looked like a runaway winner over South Korean Park Si Hun. Nearly everyone had Jones winning every round.

Yet, the judges scored it 3-2 for Park. The Jones-Park decision seemed so unfair that Carbajal’s misfortune was quickly forgotten.

None of this escaped the attention of Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee. The day after the Games, he informed Anwar Chowdhry of Pakistan, president of the International Amateur Boxing Assn. (AIBA), that if amateur boxing’s worldwide governing body couldn’t improve its scoring procedures, boxing would be dropped from the Olympics.

AIBA decided that to avoid biased or even corrupt scoring, an electronic system was needed, placing judges’ work under closer scrutiny. AIBA, particularly in Eastern Europe, had tinkered with electronic scoring for 20 years, but had never fully implemented it.

It was used for the first time internationally in the 1989 World Championships at Moscow, to mixed reviews. There were frequent complaints of delays in tabulating scores.

At the Festival boxing competition, five judges will sit before like panels. When a judge sees a boxer land a scoring blow, he pushes a red or blue button, indicating whether the boxer represents the red or blue corner.

Three of the five judges must record the punch, and all five must do so within one second for the punch to be credited. A computer records all five judges’ scores, and their work is subject to ringside scrutiny by supervisors.

No scoreboard is connected to the electronic judging, so the system will not benefit spectators.

“Right now, we have TV monitors to follow the judges along, and in time, scoreboards may be incorporated into the system,” said the USA Amateur Boxing Federation’s Jerry Dusenberry, of Portland, Ore., supervisor for the Festival system.

Dusenberry said there will be a backup panel of five judges working every bout with pens and scorecards.

“We’re trying to crawl before we run,” he said. “There will be some bugs at first.”