Boxing at the 2000 Summer Olympics

The 2000 boxing events were contested at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre (SCEC), which had opened in 1988, although a new section had been added for the 2000 Olympics. The SCEC hosted boxing, fencing, judo, and wrestling events at the Olympics. There were again 12 classes contested in 2000, the same as there had been since 1984. But there was a major change in the format of all boxing matches in 2000. Since boxing had been an Olympic sport, it had consisted of three rounds of three minutes each. But in 2000, the format was changed to four rounds of two minutes each. One other minor change was in the final placements awarded. Previously the losing quarter-finalists were listed as =5th, but in 2000 they were all given placements. The quarter-finalist losing to the gold medalist was placed 5th, the quarter-finalist losing to the silver medalist was placed 6th, the quarter-finalist losing to the losing semi-finalist who lost to the gold medalist was placed 7th, while the quarter-finalist who lost to the semi-finalist who lost to the silver medalist was placed 8th. Through 2008, this is the only Olympics at which this placement system has been used.

Once again the Cubans had the dominant team in boxing, winning four gold medals, highlighted by Félix Savón winning his third consecutive gold medal in the heavyweight division, making him only the third Olympian to win three boxing gold medals, after Hungary’s László Papp and Savón’s countryman, Teófilo Stevenson. Russian and Kazakh fighters won two gold medals each. But as a measure of how much their amateur boxing program had fallen, Sydney marked the first time that no United States’ boxer won a gold medal at the Olympics.