Written by Steve Bunce
I SAT with two Olympic dreamers 10 days before the first bell in Paris.
It was Callum Smith and Tasha Jonas, and the setting was a pub in Liverpool's Baltic Triangle.
They had the same dreams at the same time, and they dreamed of boxing in the Olympics since they were young in the Rotunda gym in the city. It is the ultimate dream of a boxing auteur.
Maybe they met 1972 bronze medalist George Turpin, maybe they knew John Hyland from the 1984 Olympics, and they definitely knew Beijing medalist David Price. Liverpool is a boxing town, make no mistake. The day after the Baltic gig, I got a message from David Burke, a real medal prospect from Atlanta in 1996.
All novice boxers have an Olympic story; they all have a memory of watching someone in the box at an Olympic competition and can remember – if they're lucky – the first time they saw or held an Olympic medal.
“It's a dream to fight in the Olympics,” Smith recalled. “This is what you want and you start getting close and you really want it.” Smith's dream ended, like many, in controversy and losing overseas in an Olympic qualifier.
It was April 2012, and the qualifier was in Trabzon, Turkey. Smith is joined by other GB hopefuls, Anthony Ogogo, Josh Taylor and Sam Maxwell. It was a difficult system for all and it was a brutal, unequal system. In some weights there were more than four and in other weights there were only two.
Smith won three times in four days to reach the semi-finals. Grandma and Taylor were with him; Taylor lost in the semi-finals but won and Ogogo reached the final. Later that summer, Ogogo would win three times, losing in the semifinals and winning the bronze medal. Ogogo is now the new king of the wrestling ring.
In Smith's second round, he easily beat Montenegro's Bosco Draskovic, then got past Hungary's Imre Szello to reach the semi-finals and face Azeri, Vatan Huseynli. In this category, Ireland's Joe Ward was out at light-heavyweight, the victim of a questionable decision against a local fighter.
At the Baltic Triangle bar, Jonas and Smith look at each other as the story of the 2012 Olympic heartbreak continues; they had attended a lot of international competitions and they knew how many times a local boxer accepted, they knew how many times politics denied a British boxer a medal. It was normal, normal and their appearance summed it up.
“You see a lot of bad decisions and you just don't want the next one to be you,” Jonas said. “It's not fair, but you expected it more often.”
In the semi-final in Trabzon, Smith lost 16-14 to Huseynli. “I won it, no doubt about it,” said Smith. He couldn't do anything about the shame of scoring goals. In the weeks and days before the first bell in London, everyone in Trabzon told me the same story. Smith was arrested. It made no difference, the dream is over, the Olympics are over. In light-heavyweight, only two reached the finals.
Smith then found out that Draskovic had been given some kind of dangerous card and that he would be in London in 2012.
“That wasn't easy,” Smith said. “It was not easy to look at the men that I had beaten while wearing an Olympic vest.” Both Draskovic and Huseynli lost their opening fights in London.
The same thing happened to Jonas in 2016. He had left the sport after the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and, apparently, after boxing at the London Olympics. In the summer of 2016, Jonas was a new mother, watching the box in Rio and seeing many women beat them. That was his motivation and probably Smith's as well. It was torture at that time.
“In GB [the gym in Sheffield] there are photos of Olympic medal winners on the wall,” said Jonas. “You look at them every day and that's motivation – all those fighters with Olympic medals.” I always wonder what it must be like to train and work under those big pictures when your picture is there. Richie Woodhall does it a few days each week; Lauren Price, Galal Yafai and Karriss Artingstall do it every day. That's recognition.
I know fighters from the Seventies and Eighties, a time when winning the old ABA title, in theory, was the only way to reach the Olympics, who cried tears because they lost the first step of their dream trip to Montreal or Moscow or Los Angeles.
The dream was Montreal, the reality was a multiple decision defeat in the light-heavyweight semi-final of the North East London divs at 3pm at York Hall.
A hundred dreams were dashed around the end of February every single Olympic year; the dream is more complicated now that the GB program is firmly established as the only route to potential Olympic glory. After all, it was invented because it works.
In the Baltic Triangle last week, as hundreds of fans lined up for pictures with Smith and Jonas and their world title belts, I saw the wonder in the eyes of the fans holding the championship belt for the first time.
Watching Roy Jones with 10 belts draped across his body is one thing, but standing between Jonas and Smith and holding the actual belt is another.
Sometime in late 1976, at Cat's Whiskers in Streatham, Terry Spinks let me hold his Olympic gold from Melbourne. I have no picture, just memories; in 2000, I visited Terry and caught it again. That is precious, a different kind of Olympic dream, but not too far from the one Callum Smith had when he got off the plane in Trabzon.
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