Amateur Boxing Reforms Judging System

GENEVA (AP) -- The International Amateur Boxing Association plans to scrap its electronic scoring system, agreeing to IOC demands to make the judging of bouts more transparent and harder to manipulate. The old system was based on three of the five judges pressing a button within the same second to validate a blow. It will be replaced by one in which each judge counts blows separately, and the highest and lowest of the five judges' scores will be discarded. "This caused a lot of debate," Gerhard Heiberg, chairman of the group's reform committee, said Saturday. "But it works really well in ski jumping. Why shouldn't it work as well in boxing?" The proposal by the executive committee must be approved at a meeting of AIBA's 195 federations during the 2007 world championships in Chicago in October. Once that occurs and the International Olympic Committee agrees, the new system will be used at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Heiberg, who also is an IOC executive board member, said the previous system was unsuitable because it was open to manipulation and misunderstanding. He added that the proposed system already is being tested. AIBA also plans to introduce an open scoring system "so that everybody can see for themselves what the referees and judges are doing. ... We want openness and transparency as much as possible here."