Weigh-in disaster at the commonwealth games
Aside from the brutality of in-ring warfare, one of the hardest aspects of boxing is the agony and stress of the gruelling process of making weight. So the last thing a boxer wants to be doing is shedding pounds for no reason before a fight.
Unfortunately that is the latest catastrophe to hit the 2010 Commonwealth games. They haven’t exactly got off to a flyer with collapsing bridges and roofs, and the latest fiasco doesn’t exactly add confidence to the whole thing as they have to postpone the boxers’ weigh-in due to misfiring scales.
Today’s weigh-in was put back to tomorrow after complaints came in that the test scales being used were faulty and coming up with inaccurate weights.
Such was the chaos that fighters were failing to make the weight,
hitting the saunas and going out running only to come back to discover they had put on more weight. Unless they were secretly stuffing themselves with Mars bars while sitting in the steam rooms then it’s nigh on impossible they could weigh more.
Australia raised the alarm over the official scales as well as the test ones with Australia team spokesman John Gatfield saying; "They went to the sauna trying to lose weight and when they came back, weighed more than the last reading."
The claims have been quashed by competition manager Lenni Gama who has denied there is any problem with the scales. “All this fuss is created by the teams who have overweight boxers in their team. The scales are perfect," Gama said.
Those claims might be slightly disputed by some of the other teams, particularly when someone found a 50kg weight that measured 51.4kg on the scales. That would probably suggest that they are not “perfect”.
New Zealand have also raised the alarm with similar problems, while England missed out on the whole thing with Rob McCracken and co arriving today.
Let’s hope they picked up a set of bathroom scales from Argos before they arrived.
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