Comments Thread For: Roy Jones Jr. Disagrees With Pros Fighting in Olympics

[Eff Pandas]

It would be perfect to have the top names at the Olympics like in golfing. Great platform for our sport. Imagine guys like Mayweather,Klitschko,Golovkin,Ward, Crawford, Pacquiao, Gonzalez, Kovalev, Khan participating for their country....great stuff!

Honestly this. Why wouldn't you wanna have the best of any sport in the Olympics instead of the best of any sport who are supposedly eating ramen & living in their moms basement in their mid to late 20's/early 30's. That **** just sounds sorta weird & sad any damn way.

And the reality is many amateur programs have such upside you can stay an amateur & be married with kids & driving a nice car, etc. & so on so its basically a paid profession in those countries. The playing field isn't even. I guarantee you if they only threw the 22 & under athletes in the Olympics for these countries where you can be a paid & well taken care of amateur the medals would be more spread out than they are these days thats for sure.

Thats just talking about boxing. In some sports professionals are already competing & have been for several Olympics. The Olympics are & have been bull***** if you are thinking you are watching the best of the unpaid athletes.

[Eff Pandas]

That's what I was thinking. Haven't the Cubans already been putting seasoned pros against kids?

Lotsa countries are doing this. Seems like a lot of the Russian states got a ton of mid to late 20's type guys. To me thats the **** or get off the pot point of amateur boxing. If you are 27 & got 12yrs of amateur boxing experience & are fighting 19yr olds with 4yrs boxing experience there is a problem. Your old ass need to turn pro or quit.

[boxingfan4life]

If they put the pro's against each other then yeah that's cool

[LOWBLOW_CHAMP]

this could actually be good, we may get some top of the line matchups, it would just be with headgear unfortunatly. wouldnt have the same feel as a real pro fight. and its kinda late to be making this change all of a sudden

[j0zef]

Olympics should stay for amateurs.

[BlackSoul]

not a fan of this either.
whats the POINT tho?
i heard that it gives pro's a chance to earn $ now if they let pros & pro's fight then i dont see the issue if they're fighting sanctioned fights for $ in-between long lulls i can side with it but pro's vs amateurs?? naw i cant rock with that bc thats like NBA teams going back to compete against high school & college teams

[imperial1]

Olympics should stay for amateurs.

^ this

How else do,you build the Olympic program and get new talent.

[thesmokingman]

Olympics should stay for amateurs.

Should it? Really?

It didn't work for basketball. Not all countries respect the for amateurs pov. Our college amateur teams were getting beaten by the world's national teams which were basically their pro teams, college boys facing grown men.

Another aspect I think needs to evolve is the amateur system itself. It is fundamentally opposed with professional boxing. Getting rid of the points system and adopting the Pro point system is a good step.

That said, I'm torn. I can see where Roy is coming from, but really it's bound to happen. If we dug deeper the whole for amateur athletes only is something made up. The reality is that athletes have always been paid. I think it's inevitable, it's bound to happen sooner or later.

In 600 B.C., a winning athlete from Athens was given 500 drachma, an enormous sum - enough that he could theoretically live off of it for the rest of his life. By 200 B.C., Greek athletes had formed professional athletic guilds similar to today's Players Associations for the various professional sports. In fact, professionalism in the Olympic Games were so widespread that they even drew criticism back then from observers who noted that the financial rewards of the Games were causing young Greek men to shirk their other studies to concentrate on athletics, resulting in these men becoming worse soldiers and scholars.

http ://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/21/sports/la-sp-sn-were-the-ancient-greek-olympic-athletes-really-amateurs-20120321

lol can't post links yet but you get the idea.

[deathofaclown]

Of course for us boxing fans we would love to see big names competing but i don't think it's good for the development of amateur boxers. The Olympics and making the Olympic teams is a big motivation and goal for these guys and it also gives them funding to carry on with their development as a fighter which is essential for most of these guys. And the amateur game gets funding to help develop teams for the Olympics. Without this funding you might get a lot of talent dropping out of the sport before they get the chance because they haven't got the structure in place to keep going.

I think this would be a real blow for the future of the sport, no matter how much i would enjoy watching it. Besides, we get pro boxing all year round every year, is it really worth serving a big blow to the amateur kids coming up just for a 4-week long event every 4 years. I don't think so.

[RINGG]

Winning in the olymics makes prospects. The whole amateur system will collapse. I am against it as well.