Responding after the International Olympic Committee made their decision, Leonis club chief coach Dave Thompson said that while he wasn’t entirely in favour of women’s boxing when he was a younger man, the sport had become much safer and that locally he had seen some ‘very good boxers’ including most recently 17-year-old Kadie O’Brien, a flyweight who has flown out to university in Australia.
‘I told her that university’s more important than boxing, but to join a club once she gets there,’ he said. ‘Then there’s 12-year-old Kaitlan Day and I must have coached four or five women boxers who were serious about their intent, and didn’t see South Hill Gym as a “poser’s paradise”.
While the International Olympic Committee’s executive board voted in Berlin to recommend that golf and rugby be added to the 2016 Games, softball, baseball, and three other sports were left out.
Softball and baseball had been seeking a return after being dropped from the schedule in 2005. They were the first sports in 69 years to be dropped from the Olympic line-up. The committee also declined to add squash, karate, and roller sports.
The full 106-member IOC assembly will have the final say in voting in Copenhagen, Denmark, in October.
