The historic US women's Olympic boxing trials have concluded in Spokane and the Olympic contenders have been decided. For Marlen Esparza, Queen Underwood, and Claressa Shields, the journey now moves on to the World Championships in Qinhuangdao, China - where each boxer must finish in the top eight in their weight category to qualify for the full Olympic event in London this summer.



Last week we introduced the Olympic trials and discussed their historic significance as the first such event of their type in the US. Now we introduce the winning contenders and acknowledge a few of the women who helped pave the way for them.

The winners

The Flyweight

Marlen Esparza may come to be seen as the sport's Golden Girl. A student body president from Pasadena, Texas, who postponed her college enrolment to target the London Olympics, Esparza is a bright and engaging champion. After a first round walkover at the Olympic trials, Esparza won all three of her fights coolly - with her final bout against Tyriesha Douglas providing the biggest contrast in styles. The spirited Douglas (sister of fellow Olympic contender Antoine) is all heart and a pressure fighter, but tends to tire and get ragged later in rounds. The final was her sixth fight in consecutive nights, as losses had dropped her into the challenger bracket, and it showed. Esparza fought a boxer's final, withstanding pressure when she had to and putting up a comfortable 32-17 scoreline. Watch out for her stars and stripes do-rag on the podium. You may get to see it very soon - Esparza may be in action again in less than two weeks, if she decides to go for a record-breaking seventh consecutive national title.

The Lightweight

The hometown crowd who cheered on Queen Underwood to victory here were partisan, but cheerfully, rather than fiercely, so. It just wasn't that kind of event. To repeated shouts of "Queen! Queen!", Underwood won her final bout against Mikaela Mayer 22-19, with a more convincing performance than the scoreline suggests, as Underwood repeatedly found her angles to get her shots off. It could have been so different though - against the much taller N'yteeyah Sherman on Thursday night, Underwood had to dig deep for a 25-24 victory against an opponent whose 7" reach advantage saw her lead till the final round, with Underwood looking puzzled and discouraged. Taking the Gordian knot approach though, Underwood charged across the ring in the fourth and pushed her opponent back to the ropes, with two big punches at the end of the round swinging the bout decisively for the sometime construction worker. Underwood claims on her US boxing bio that her greatest strength is "My heart which saves me in the last round'. She showed it at these trials - her noisy fans may yet be put through the emotional wringer at the Olympics.

The Middleweight

If Underwood was the big local hope and story coming in to these championships, Claressa Shields was the story of the week. The 16 year old middleweight from Flint, Michigan, waltzed through her opening three bouts this week, before facing probably the toughest final of all the contenders in Tika Hemingway. In their previous fight on Thursday, there had been a couple of moments when Hemingway's pressure had seemed to rattle the younger boxer as the older fighter chased the fight in the fourth - and evidently that was her game plan as they met again in the final. Hemingway cornered Shields repeatedly, trying to smother the favorite and test her mental as well as physical resilience. The junior high school student (that's junior high school student...) did not crack though and countered ferociously to grind out the win, 23-18. Her glee at the verdict just reminded you of how young she is and also that no matter how tough a life she has had - and it has been tough by all accounts - she approaches the sport without cynicism. Compare this to the pathetic spectacle served up by David Haye and Dereck Chisora this weekend (and its backdrop of macho posturing and petty promotional politics) and give me the sight of Shields hopping around the ring in joy at the final verdict anyday...

The pioneers:

The coach

Earlier this year Dr Christy Halbert was presented with the US Olympic Committee's Olympic Torch Award for individual services to the movement. As she accepted the award, Dr Halbert announced, to thunderous applause, that "This will be the first Olympic Games in history to include men and women in all sports." If she felt some personal vindication it was well-earned - since starting boxing as a way to earn money through grad school (her doctorate in sociology included research on the stereotypes surrounding women who fight), for 15 years Halbert has been a ceaseless advocate of women's boxing worldwide, a Team USA coach, an author of one of the most respected boxing manuals in circulation, a resource center director and finally, and most appropriately, voicing the commentary at this week's trials. She performed the latter with a supremely even delivery, never swayed by the mood in the room, but immaculately tuned to the technical nuances of each boxer's performance (she reminded me a little of fellow ex-boxer Jim Watt performing a similar focussed delivery on British boxing commentaries). If Dr Halbert was deeply affected by the symbolism of the historic moment, she never betrayed it, but she's played a big part in making that moment happen at all and you hope that as she leaves Spokane she's allowing herself a small smile of satisfaction before the next struggle begins.

The activist

As noted in our first story on the Olympic trials, the last time such a significant breakthrough for women's boxing occurred was probably the 1995 Golden Gloves in New York, when, after 68 years of the tournament, women were allowed to compete for the first time. Fittingly, the first of those bouts, in the 108 lb class, was fought by Dee Hamaguchi - a young boxer and activist who fought out of Gleason's gym in Brooklyn. Hamaguchi had tried to enter the 1994 Golden Gloves by entering under the name D. Hamaguchi, with nobody initially realising that this was a young woman from Harlem. In the ensuing furore, which at one point involved the ACLU, Hamaguchi, a Yale trained architect, was able to use knowledge of state gender equality law - knowledge she'd gleaned in a fair housing seminar - to force the Golden Gloves to allow her and other women to enter. She later turned pro.

The film maker

Another name on that first Golden Gloves bill was fellow Gleason's alum Katya Bankowsky, who fought in the inaugural women's 139lb category (and who made the documentary "Shadow Boxers" mentioned in last week's story). I caught up with Bankowsky over the weekend and asked her about that time and her reaction to this weeks' trials. She recalled trying to get funding for a women's boxing film in 1993 (typical reaction: "Women's boxing? No-one cares. It's vulgar. It's never going to amount to anything") before finally just going for it after the Golden Gloves experience and persuading then kickboxer and aspiring actor Lucia Rijker to work with her on the project that became "Shadow Boxers".

Bankowsky recalls that initial period as a time of momentum - by the time her own documentary came out in 1998, several films on the sport by other women were in the pipeline. As acclaim followed, she and Rijker were invited to show her doc at the Toronto film festival, where they hung out with Hilary Swank - whose "Boys Don't Cry" was also premiering. Later, after Rijker had been invited by Swank to train the actor for "Million Dollar Baby", the boxer called Bankowsky in New York at 4am to excitedly say that she'd just been out in LA with the film's writer Paul Haggis, who claimed that "he and Clint" had watched "Shadow Boxers" 25 times.

At those sort of moments the thought that Olympic competition for women boxers might still be the best part of a decade away seemed an absurdity, though as Christy Halbert would certainly testify, there was a long road to acceptance ahead. That said, as Bankowsky also points out, "You don't expect change to come and then it comes overnight. Who would have thought that women in Afghanistan would be training for the Olympics in the same auditorium where the Taliban were executing women just a few years ago?" Now a TV ad director, Bankowsky is currently trying to finance another documentary, entitled "Burkha Boxers", inspired by these women and other boxers in the socially transforming Middle East.

The English pioneer

One of the paradoxes about a sport routinely decried by its critics for its barbarity, is the almost curatorial reverence its practitioners tend to have for its history - and women's boxing is no exception. When we spoke, Bankowsky was quick to acknowledge a debt to Barbara Buttrick, the Yorkshire-born fighter, who in turn had been inspired by a chance discovery, as a teenager, of a newspaper article on the early 1900s prizefighter Polly Burns. In the 1940s Buttrick fought as a 98 pound flyweight in fairs and boxing booths around Britain, before travelling and eventually migrating to Dallas, Texas in 1957, where she used the state's first female boxing license to defeat the holder of the second, Phyllis Kugler, for the first women's world championship. When she retired after over 1000 exhibition matches and 18 professional fights she had become an early icon of the women's boxing game and an advocate in her own right - eventually founding the Women's International Boxing Federation in 1993.

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