Middleweight (≤75 kilograms), Men

By the start of 1980 José Gómez seems a racing certainty to be Olympic champion. He held the world and Pan American titles and had excelled at the USA-Cuba duals over the past two years. A few months before the Olympic Games began he faced the possibility that he would not even travel to Moscow after he suffered injuries in a car accident. He had partially recovered by the time the Games began but not was his usual self in the early rounds. He narrowly avoided being eliminated in his first bout then had to recover from a standing count in his next bout. By the quarter-finals he was beginning to look like the fighter he had been in 1979 and his improvement continued up to, and including, the final against the Soviet Union’s Viktor Savchenko. Gómez knocked his Soviet opponent to the floor on two occasions to win the fight clearly on the scorecards of four judges. The fifth, an Algerian, inexplicably scored the fight for the Soviet fighter.