To think women's boxing should have 3 minute rounds

[Florenz]

Having just watched Katie Taylor's fight from last night, it is ridiculous that women's boxing only has 2 minute rounds and also that a world title match is only 10 rounds instead of 12. If we want women's boxing to taken as seriously as mens it should be equal in terms of round length and number of rounds.

It was a great fight btw.

RJnomore1

Here's the highlights

I don't like boxing and it wouldn't matter what they did, I wouldn't watch.

I think women tennis players are still viewed as second class to the men because they don't play as long. Therefore spectators don't get as much for their money. (I understand women say they're prepared to play longer but the organisations say they don't have enough time in the schedules.) So I'd say to be viewed as equal, they'd need to have the same contest structure as men. Having said that, I'm not sure that most people will ever view men's and womens sports as being equal. Just about everyone knows Usain Bolts name as the fastest man in the world. Who is the fastest woman?

Its only in a few major tournaments such as the Grand Slams that mens tennis is 5 sets. The rest of the time its the same as womens with 3 sets. I don't think women have been given a lot of choice as to whether they want 5 sets at major tournaments.

Athletics has done a lot of levelling up. For instance, in the 1980s, women were still restricted from running the marathon! For a long time, the longest championship event for women was 800m. And the womens' steeplechase is only a very recently introduced event at championship level.

Doesn't stop these "newly permitted" events being highly competitive.

I've taken part in amateur cross country races and the women's races are usually quite a bit shorter than men's (5.5-6k for women, 8-10k for men) At one county meet it was 8k for women and 12k for men. 12k seems bloody horrendous is quite long for a xc race, I'm not sure why they couldn't make it 10k for all.

@AchatAVendre thanks I didn’t know that about tennis - I usually just watch Wimbledon!

@Notimeforaname thank you for that link. What a fight! I really wish I’d made the effort to get up for it now. I love Katie Taylor - although my absolute hero is savannah Marshall, who is supposed to be announcing her next fight very soon.

I feel a need to point out that the sport where you are most likely to suffer serious injury or death is horse riding btw - even with protective clothing - but that’s nicely middle class and makes for pretty photos I guess.

I don't like women boxing either.

Dons tin hat.....

Thank god I'm not alone; I'm not keen on the concept of "banning things" overall, but for this I make an exception - isn't there enough violence around without glorifying it?

And it is violence, as we see when its biggest fans insist it's really a sport but give it away by referring to "fights" when they want to ramp up the excitement

Can't abide boxing. It's ridiculous

YABU. Boxing, whether by women or men should just be banned. It's hardly a sport when the aim is to cause your opponent a brain injury - punching someone in the head until you knock them out/they are unable to retaliate.
And brain damage is what they will eventually end up with from getting punched repeatedly in the head with forces that wouldn't be out of place in a car accident.
On top of that it is glorifying violence - hardly what society needs.
I'd have hoped rather than wanting to equal men in something as stupid, women would have had the brains to steer clear of it completely.

For those people that don't like boxing I think it is barbaric that's fair enough everybody is entitled to their opinion however that is not what @Florenz asked.

This ^^. I can't believe how many people have taken this thread off on a tangent??

OP, what are the reasons for the time difference?

It was a great fight, great competitors, great professionalism shown by Taylor and Serrano and a great day for women's sport. There's a touch of the pearl-clutching with all the 'I hate boxing' comments.

YABU @Florenz. I think it would be better if male boxers did the same as their female counterparts.

This is quite interesting about the lives boxing has “saved”. Also, Boxing ranks as the 11th most dangerous sport (headline misleading), even below swimming. Agree that professional boxing can look pretty gruesome though.

www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1062315/alan-hubbard-boxing-the-most-dangerous-sport-of-all-but-it-is-still-worth-the-risk

Indeed, both men and women should box for the same amount of time - zero for both, it is an appalling "sport".

I never knew so many people were opposed to boxing. It is a great sport. Yes there are risks involved as there are with all sports. But what is the alternative? Ban all sports?

I heard about the sport of chess boxing the other day, yes it’s a genuine sport where there is a round of boxing then they play a round of chess!

What is the alternative? Ban all sports?

This is the kind of hyperbole that does boxing no favours at all and shows the desperation supporters have to resort to in trying to defend it
It's true that many others carry risks, but boxing's the only one where harming the opponent is the actual aim

Hence why it's called fighting ...

If you're lucky enough to find a sport you love your whole life changes. It brings self confidence, joy, friends, identity, everything. But then some do gooder tries to destroy it for you because they don't agree with your sport, so that thing you love gets taken away from you. Do NOT do this. It's fine to not like something it's NOT fine to try to remove a sport what other people might grow up loving.

Also I remember a time when women weren't even LEGALLY allowed to box so Katie's night was an unbelievable march forward for women. Don't take that away from her, believe me this opportunity for women can disappear as soon as it appeared.

Lastly the Coliseum reference is weird, that has nothing to do with boxing. Amateur boxing is extremely well regulated.

Loved Katie's fight. She did a lot for the sport. And yes OP completely agree, same rounds, same time periods needed.

Then it would be the womens 900m race instead.

Equality doesn’t mean we must do everything like men. Why is the mens version the bench mark that womens sport should be measured against?

Yes, women have the heptathlon and the men the decathlon, and that doesn't seem to be a problem for anybody. Plus, the main skill in those is in pushing your own body to the limits of what it can achieve rather than to use it to try to seriously injure somebody else's body.

As for the 'protecting reproductive' organs thing, women's reproductive system as a whole is higher up and covers a wider area than men's, which hangs down out of the way and is relatively easy to avoid hitting by accident.

Also, the glaring difference is that a man will never be pregnant, whereas a woman could quite conceivably (so to speak) be in the very early stages of what would be a wanted pregnancy without even knowing. In fact she may be further on in her pregnancy and fully aware of it, but nevertheless still decide that she wants to continue boxing - after all, men don't get told to stop when they're soon going to be parents. Pregnancy usually involves the tiny person inside doing the punching and kicking - not being the recipient of it.

I absolutely detest ALL boxing and I firmly reject the argument that 'all sports have an element of risk'. Of course, this is true, but in almost all sports, the risks can come into play by accident, when something goes wrong. With boxing, it's the express purpose of the sport to aim to cause somebody injury. We're so inured to the terminology, but take a moment to think about it: the target is to knock somebody out - ideally unconscious. That's oceans apart from running the fastest, jumping the highest or lifting the heaviest weight.

Would we be so blase about synchronised swimming if the 'most expert' routines were considered to be ones where one of the swimmers stands on top of the other one, who is lying on the bottom of the pool and struggling for breath? Would we see it as a true noble skill to cause somebody to nearly drown (or to be the one nearly drowning yourself), but just about manage to resurface in time to survive?

Would dressage be considered as harmless if routines regularly included choreographing the horses to throw the riders off and trample them? Or, to swap it around, if the horses had to escape somebody whacking them with an iron rod like a pinata? If that were considered THE very finest, professional demonstration of sporting prowess?

Men's decathlon and womens' heptathlon is actually a problem that will have to be solved in athletics in the future. But they are actually very different events. The female athletes tend to be much more skilled in relative world ranking terms in the individual events (e.g. Jessica Ennis could have made the Olympic team in the hurdles, KJT is a top class high jumper, etc), whereas that hardly ever happens in the decathlon. The 1500m at the end of the decathlon is a bit of a pity fest actually, so slow in comparison to "real" 1500m specialist runners are the men, whereas the women's 800m tends to produce some genuinely national ranking times. Its likely that the decathlon dilutes the different events somewhat, and is biased in favour of strength athletes who struggle to run speed endurance events well.

But of course its much easier just to criticise the women for being "less good" than the men rather than looking into the sport.

I agree it should be 3 minute rounds as do most of the top women boxers when asked about it or so it seems . I was going to stay awake and watch live but I got as far as Liam Smith winning and fell asleep .