Boxing and the Olympics have never been easy bedfellows. Back in 1924 Britain’s Harry Mallin, the defending middleweight champion, lost a split decision at the Paris Games to France’s Roger Brousse in the quarter-finals. Mallin complained, showing the referee bite marks on his chest and shoulder (the British press later suggested that Brousse had been “sampling the unroasted beef of Old England”), and after an appeal the home fighter was disqualified (it emerged that Brousse’s first-round opponent had also complained of being bitten). Brousse’s fans had to be restrained by the police. Then the Frenchman emerged for the final and it took another intervention from the massed gendarmes to allow Mallin to take his rightful place against John Elliott.

Four years later in Amsterdam there were further violent ringside ructions after home-team decisions, at the Rome Games in 1960 judges were sacked after a series of incompetent decisions, in 1968 Choh Dong-kih staged an hour-long sit-down protest in the ring in Tokyo after a disqualification, while Spain’s Valentín Loren chinned the referee after his DQ. It’s a long and murky history. Or perhaps not that murky given the brazenness of some judging decisions. And the most brazenly bad decision of modern times came in Seoul in 1988 when Roy Jones Jr took on South Korea’s Park Si-hun in the light middleweight gold medal match.

The boxing in Seoul had been tumultuous from the off and reached an early nadir in the ugly clinch-strewn bantamweight battle between Bulgaria’s Alexander Hristov and South Korea’s Byun Jong-il. Byun was twice docked points by the referee, New Zealand’s Keith Walker. The deductions cost him the fight and led to Korean officals piling into the ring, aiming kicks and punches at Walker. The referee fled the arena and, almost immediately, the country. While he made his escape, Byun sat in the ring for 67 minutes in protest.

The 19-year-old Jones had blazed his way to the final in a flurry of bionic left hooks and twinkling toes. It took him two minutes to dispose of M’tendere Makalamba in his opening match, a brief and brutal affair. Czechoslovakia’s Michal Franek survived a pummelling in the second round, but lost by unanimous 5-0 decision. Jones skipped around the ring pinging punches into Yevgeni Zaytsev’s face in the quarter-finals on his way to another 5-0 win, and was tested by Britain’s Richie Woodhall in the semi-final but largely untroubled and was given another unanimous decision by the judges.

Park, meanwhile, had been far less impressive. Some observers felt he could, possibly should, have lost all four of his fights on the way to the final. Certainly Vincenzo Nardiello felt he deserved the nod from the judges in their quarter-final – when the 3-2 split decision went to the South Korean, the three-times Italian champion went to remonstrate furiously with the officials and had to be dragged away from the ring.

The final, on the last day of boxing at the Games, was a rout, Jones, barely bothering to raise his guard, landed 86 punches to Park’s 32. The Korean took two standing eight counts and was twice warned by the referee. NBC’s Count-A-Punch recorder scored the rounds 20-3, 30-15 and 36-14 in Jones’s favour. Watch the footage – it’s an utterly one-sided affair.

The three judges didn’t think so. Bob Kasule of Uganda, Uruguay’s Alberto Durán and Hiouad Larbi of Morocco gave Park the fight, two others giving it to Jones. As the referee, Aldo Leoni, raises Park’s hand, the Korean fighter looks entirely embarrassed. Leoni himself looks disgusted. “I can’t believe they’re doing this to you,” he whispered to the distraught American.

The medal ceremony is equally cringeworthy. Jones received huge cheers, Park, standing on the top of the podium, couldn’t have looked more sheepish had he been bleating and swathed in wool. He held the American’s fist aloft. Jones still looks shell-shocked. “I don’t blame him,” said Jones. “He didn’t score the fight. That’s the worst I’ve ever been dealt in my life. They put the silver medal around my neck, and I took it right off. I won’t put it around my neck ever again.”

What happened next?

In the aftermath an angry American press pack confronted Larbi. “It was a terrible thing,” he was quoted as saying by Sports Illustrated. “The American won easily; so easily, in fact, that I was positive my four fellow judges would score the fight for the American by a wide margin. So I voted for the Korean to make the score only 4-1 for the American and not embarrass the host country.” Larbi, Kasule and Durán were suspended for six months pending an investigation but eventually cleared by the International Boxing Association (AIBA).

Several years later, evidence emerged. Karl-Heinz Wuhr, the general secretary of AIBA, was mixing his boxing duties with work as a Stasi agent. When the Stasi’s secret files were released following the collapse of the Soviet Union the investigative journalist and author Andrew Jennings found allegations of outright bribery. “They did not miss a chance to try to corrupt or influence me,” Wuhr wrote. “They [the host nation] repeatedly attempted to persuade me to take back my decisions punishing judges they seemed to have an interest in. There were always judges prepared to declare a South Korean boxer victor, even if this was completely ludicrous.” He alleged bribes had been paid to several unnamed judges, including three from Africa and one from South America and felt the “manipulation” went high up into the executive of AIBA. The referee Leoni supported the claims, saying an Argentinian colleague had been offered an envelope stuffed with cash by the Korean boxing authorities.

Jones, though, has never received the gold medal that is rightfully his. In 1997 an IOC investigation concluded that although the offending judges had been wined and dined by Korean organisers, “there is no evidence of corruption in the boxing events in Seoul”. The chief upshot of one of the worst moments in Olympic history was the introduction of a new electronic scoring system (although that failed to prevent new accusations of bias at the Atlanta Games eight years later).

Jones went on to be arguably the best pound-for-pound fighter of the 1990s. “When I had that problem in South Korea. I went with an interpreter to face the guy I fought,” he said in 2004. “I asked him ‘Did you win that fight?’ He shook his head and said ‘No’. And then I was cool with it. If you tell me the truth, I’m cool.”

How the Guardian covered the story:

Rumours of bribery and cheating followed the crowning yesterday of the South Korean light-middleweight Park Si-hun as Olympic champion. Park was awarded a 3-2 points decision over Roy Jones of the United States in a fight most observers thought the Korean had clearly lost.

Jones was later awarded the Val Barker trophy for the outstanding boxer of the Games.

The British judge, Rod Robertson, one of the most respected officials in amateur boxing, who was a spectator, said: “I can only use one word for the decision … disgraceful.” Even Anwar Chowdhry, the president of the sport’s world governing body, Association International de Boxe Amateur, called the decision “unfair.”

Judges from the Soviet Union and Hungary voted Jones the overwhelming winner by four points, those from Uganda, Uruguay and Morocco had the Korean just in front. The latter three judges were also involved when another South Korean, flyweight Kim Kwang-Sun, won his country’s only other boxing final in a 4-1 decision over East Germany’s Andrew Tews.