The World Boxing Association Classifications Committee awarded the Boxer of the Month designation to Mario Barrios, who won a unanimous decision over Batyr Akhmedov last Saturday night in Los Ángeles. The award may or may not bode well for the Akhmedov camp, which is planning to file an appeal with the WBA requesting an immediate rematch. The honorable mention for boxer of the month is Joseph Diaz Jr. Minimumweight champion Monserrat Alarcon was chosen as the female boxer of the month.
Coincidentally, Akhmedov and his manager Vadim Kornilov issued a statement today that lashed out at the judging of the Barrios-Akhmedov fight.
Batyr Akhmedov: “I worked my whole life to become a world champion and when the opportunity came I clearly won the fight. I dominated the fight from start to finish, re-watch the tape as I have and see how bad Barrios was hurt in every round. After the tenth round, he wanted to quit he was so badly beaten. I don’t even think the judges watched the fight.”
Vadim Kornilov: “This is the height of incompetence, these judges needed to be immediately held responsible to the full extent permitted. They stole the world title from Batyr.
“Look at the photos from the fight and after the fight, Barrios did not win that fight and his whole team didn’t even expect to get their hand raised. Barrios is suspended and cannot enter the ring for the next six months, how is he going to defend his championship? He cannot fight for medicals reasons due to injuries suffered in the fight and Batyr could fight next month if the opportunity was given.
“I am very positive that if Batyr lost a fight in a similar fashion, he would have given the belt over to the other guy, or would have been the one to request a rematch as he would not want to be a champion when millions all over the world saw that he did not win this fight and did not deserve the belt. We hope that Barrios being a real warrior that showed a lot of character and survived a very, very tough fight will support the rematch which I am sure the whole world will want to see.
“The rounds were easy to score, you saw who did the damage, and they got a number of critical rounds wrong. There were not that many close rounds and any other professional judge will confirm this, it’s on them now, they have to live with what they did for the rest of their lives. Batyr will just go on towards his dream of becoming a world champion, what they did here is just an obstacle to his goal.
“We will go ahead with filing an appeal with the World Boxing Association and requesting an immediate rematch. Batyr did what we expected he would do since this fight was ordered a year ago by the WBA for the mandatory position. If Batyr was getting beat up as bad as Barrios and had such a significant injury which looked like a cheekbone fracture which can cause damage to the eye socket, the fight would have been stopped.
“Everything was done to help this kid get the victory that he did not deserve. We greatly appreciate all the fans, which unlike the judges, don’t care who the A or B side is and where each fighter is from, the arena knew who won the fight and so did most of the experts all over the world that wrote about this fight on social media, and they unanimously put justice ahead of nationality and other aspects.”
Not always you are the lucky one to receive two gift in less than a month. Let see the way Barrios will do against a legit. top 10 guy. Let alone Prograis or Taylor. It could be a legalized crime to put him against any of them.
Too many boxers are robbed by judges and I have seen this happen time and time again for all the years that I have followed the sport of boxing.
It’s time that a new system of scoring was introduced, based strictly on scoring punches – which it’s supposed to be anyway. I don’t know how accurate Compubox is, but I am sure that with modern technology, a fairly failsafe system could be implemented to take guesswork and human error out of boxing scoring.
I’m fed up with seeing ridiculously bad judging and seeing boxers being robbed of wins because the judges seemed to be watching completely different fights.
Right, and now you’ll have Russia tampering with our Boxing scoring systems? No thanks. Thats obviously not a way to stop corruption in Boxing
Boxer of the month? He lost! The Russian fighter got robbed.
I guess the WBA agreed with the corrupt judges.
Let me phrase that CORRECTLY:
WBA names Barrios “Robbery of the Month”
There, fixed it for ya.
How are naming fighter of the the month a fighter that got beaten a pulp. Yes, he was effective for the beginning of the fight, but Batir took over after the 5th round.
The solution would be for Boxing fans to have the ability to vote certain judges off the panel. If a judge has a history of appeals then get rid of them, especially for the meaningful fights.