Other sports like soccer, football even basketball has advanced with sports science and nutrition. You see track and field records get broken. Swimming as well. NFL combine you see more 300 lbs athletes run ridiculous 40s and you see more and more db, wr, rb etc run sub 4.3 40s. Strength sports you see a record broken every other week.
I don’t feel that with boxing. Too much cherry picking and underhanded tactics around. Even Canelo who I rate highly has pulled off shady shit like doping in the GGG rematch. Fucking tyson fury heavyweight champ at the time getting embarrassed by ngannou who has never boxed professionally mma champ or not. (Thank goodness for usyk showing what a real boxing champion looks like). Boxers like crawford, charlo, brooks, mikey garcia, constantly jumping up two weights for terrible fights that mostly turn into mismatches. Pacquiao at his age being fast tracked to a title shot with barrios which derailed the undisputed talks. Jake paul being ranked 14 at cruiserweiht after Chavez who never won at cruiser, Mike tyson who was damn near 60 with a myriad of health problems.
Then there is the fact that boxing in the Olympics is being removed due to too much corruption in AIBA. The talent pool in boxing was dire before its gonna be much worse. Most people don’t wanna be punched in the head so it shouldn’t be surprising that its dire. Sport ain’t gonna die but good lord its in a terrible state outside of the lower weights like Inoue weight and lower. Once that Riyad season honeymoon period goes away its gonna be long.
Shit I did it all. Boxing, mma, rugby, even in soccer heading CTE is a risk. Now I have a fuckton of health issues. That and military. For combat sport a lot of the damage is done in sparring. A lot of old school sparring wars we did were more brutal than the matches.
Just another way to keep the working poor down…
It has a fucked up history. It was very popularly practiced back then by aristocrats but it grew in prominence among the working class and the aristocrats realized they wanted no smoke in it.
Thankfully we have invented the perfect ‘sport’ for the aristocracy: golf!