By Cliff Rold

There has been nothing wrong with referring to bantamweight Shakur Stevenson as Team USA’s best chance at an Olympic gold medal in boxing.

There has been everything wrong with anyone failing to qualify the statement.

Stevenson is the best shot at a men’s gold. With a walkover off an injury, he will skip the semi-finals and head straight to his shot at golden glory. But Team USA’s best chances for boxing gold are the same in 2016 as they were in 2012.

Her name is Claressa Shields and, at age 21, she may be on the verge of becoming a two-time gold medalist in the women’s middleweight division.

That she is going for gold a second time might say a lot about the different roads men and women travel in boxing. Had an American male middleweight won gold at age 17 in 2012, it’s hard to imagine them not already being on the verge of title contention as a professional. Signing bonuses and aspirational guarantees would have been in abundance.

For Shields, there wasn’t the same temptation. Staying amateur worked out fine, getting her some advertising gigs as an Olympian and keeping her on the road to Rio. She won the last two women’s world championships in her division.

She is already a lock for at least a bronze medal. 

Watching her dominate Russia’s 23-year old Iaroslava Iakushina on Wednesday, it’s hard to imagine her falling short of the finals. After a bye into the round of eight, Shields won every round on two scorecards and lost one on a third. That lost round was a reach.

Shields does everything one would want to see. She sticks the jab, she lands with power, she moves her head, she counters beautifully; Claressa Shields is every bit as good as a ring record nearing eighty fights with only a single loss.

Eventually, one would hope, she can genuinely cash in on her gifts. For that to happen, one of two things will have to occur. The fistic game will have to make room for her in the US.

Or she will need to keep her passport handy.

While women’s boxing has proven capable of selling tickets in Europe and some other parts of the world, it has had only intermittent success in the US. Christy Martin made the cover of Sports Illustrated as a popular undercard attraction in the 90s. She eventually headlined some shows of her own, most notably with the woman who proved that there could be stardom in the women’s game.

Stardom came with a famous name.

Laila Ali received coverage from the moment she started her career as the daughter of the most famous athlete that ever lived. She was in a pay-per-view headliner with the daughter of Joe Frazier early in her career.

Over time, the attention and the dedication she showed to her craft combined to make Laila Ali a genuine, serious fighter. She beat pretty much everyone around her minus Ann Wolfe, even headlining a pay show with the smaller Martin in a clash of America’s most famous women fighters. Ali parlayed boxing into other revenue streams, getting out before the game got her.

It was a model career in many respects.

Since Ali, women’s boxing in the US has been hard to find.

Shields could change that.

Shields should change that.

In an era when flyweights have found their way onto HBO (and that’s been a net gain for viewers), the excuse that no one would know her opponents shouldn’t be a drawback. Few outside of hardcore fans knew who the opponents of Roman Gonzalez were. He’s impressed enough to garner his own main event slot.

The way to get people to know a fighter and their potential foes is to showcase them on the road to each other.

The best fighter in the professional middleweight division is probably Christina Hammer of Germany. Hammer (19-0, 9 KO), only 26 now, won the WBO women’s crown in only her eighth fight and has since also won the WBO crowns at super welterweight and super middleweight. Hammer also holds a win over current WBC titlist Kali Reis (10-5-1, 4 KO) of the US.

Given an amateur pedigree roughly equivalent on her side of the sport to a Vasyl Lomachenko, Shields could probably be ready for the elite of her professional division in little time. Fights with opponents like Reis and Hammer aren’t going to come right out of the blocks.

They could come without a long wait.

It all comes down to who wants to invest in Shields after Rio.

The UFC has shown that women can draw right alongside men in a combat sport if showcased and marketed with the same gusto as the men. There has to be a starting point. Ronda Rousey opened a floodgate in the UFC.

Fair minded sports fans in the States shouldn’t have a hard time getting excited for a two-time Olympic gold medalist from their own country.

Claressa Shields can be a professional game changer if the game will change for her. 

For now, Shields continues with the task at hand. She still has two fights to go. The road to gold in Rio goes through Kazakhstan’s Dariga Shakimova on Friday in the semi-finals at 2:30 PM EST.

Previous Olympic Thoughts

Cliff Rold is the Managing Editor of BoxingScene and a member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board and the Boxing Writers Association of America.  He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com