General Information
The United States Olympic Education Center is home to the nation’s only residential boxing program. Established in 1987, the program has produced numerous Olympic, world and national champions.
The USOEC boxing team, consisting of 15-20 resident boxers, trains in the boxing gym on the second floor of Northern Michigan University’s Superior Dome.
USOEC boxing alumni include 1991 world champion and 1992 Olympian Vernon Forrest; 1996 Olympic gold medalist David Reid; 1997 U.S. champion and 2000 Olympian David Jackson; 1999 world champion and 2000 Olympian Brian Viloria; and 2000 Olympic bronze medalists Jermain Taylor and Clarence Vinson.
Boxing, also known as the "sweet science", is a sport in which two participants of similar weight fight each other with their fists in a series of two minute intervals called "rounds". In Olympic boxing, the fights avoid their opponent's punches while trying to land punches of their own. Points are awarded for clean, solid blows to the legal area on the front of the opponent's body above the waistline, with hits to the head and torso being especially valuable.
The fighter with the most points after the scheduled number of rounds is declared the winner. Victory may also be achieved if the opponent is knocked down and unable to get up before the referee counts to ten (a knockout) or if the opponent is deemed too injured to continue (a technical knockout, or TKO).
Olympic boxing comprises four rounds of two minutes, each with a one-minute interval between each round.
Competitors wear protective headgear and gloves with a white strip across the knuckle. A punch is considered a scoring punch only when the boxers connect with the white portion of the gloves. Each punch that lands on the head or torso is awarded a point.
A new scoring system was invented for Olympic boxing: using a computer, judges must press a button every time they think a boxer landed a punch. When three or more of the five judges press the button within a second of each other, the punch counts as a "point" for the fighter that landed it.
A referee monitors the fight to ensure that competitors use only legal blows. Any boxer who repeatedly lands "low blows" is disqualified. Referees also ensure that the boxers don't use holding tactics to prevent the opponent from landing a punch, if this happens the referee separates the opponents and orders them to continue boxing. Referees will stop the bout if a boxer is seriously injured, if one boxer is significantly dominating the other or if the score is severely imbalanced.
Boxing first appeared at the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Games and, apart from the 1912 Stockholm Games, has always been apart of them.
Al Mitchell is the program’s head coach. Mitchell was the coach of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Team and the technical adviser to the 2004 Athens Olympic squad.
Assisting Mitchell is former USOEC resident Luis Gomez.
“I have so many dreams that I had thought about before that were really unattainable. Luckily, I wasn’t restricted enough to know that they were unattainable. Coming here, to the Olympic Education Center, made my dreams realistic. If I can't touch the stars, at least I’m on the moon, and that’s here at the U.S. Olympic Education Center,” said former USOEC boxer Michael Nunnally.
