24.05.06 – By W. Gregory Guedel: During the dark days of the Cold War, Soviet-bloc boxers were a mysterious group that most fight fans in the West only saw during the Olympics. Often the seasoned competitors of the USSR and its satellite states would triumph over young American fighters — who would later become world champions in the professional ranks.
The success of the Soviet fighters in amateur competitions, combined with the communist prohibition on professional bouts, led to many “What if” questions regarding the potential of Eastern boxers to succeed against top-ranked professionals.
Those questions are now being answered conclusively. Presently, the Heavyweight champion of 3 of the 4 primary sanctioning bodies is from a country of the former Soviet Union, and received his primary boxing training within the Soviet sports system. If Oleg Maskaev repeats his demolition of Hasim Rachman this summer, it will be an ex-Soviet sweep of the Heavyweight division. How did this first generation of professional fighters from the East so quickly capture a title that had been in Anglo-American hands since James Figg in the 1730s? Emmanuel Steward has lamented that all of the top American Heavyweight prospects now elect to play football or basketball instead. There is undoubtedly some truth there, but that alone cannot account for the fact that fighters from a particular state system now dominate the division, with more prospects on the way.
The key to understanding the success of ex-Soviet fighters is to understand the workings of the system that produced them. In the former Soviet Union, sport was not treated merely as a form of recreation or entertainment. It was instead viewed as a fundamental element of national prestige, and a primary means of demonstrating socialist “superiority” to the world. Gold medals won in international competitions were a key propaganda tool, and were pursued with all the resources the government could muster. There was no such thing as “friendly competition” in the communist world – sport was serious business, and served as a surrogate for actual armed combat against the West. Producing winners was a government priority that rivaled the production of tanks and missiles – and both were designed to intimidate the capitalist world.
With that philosophy in mind, the USSR established a comprehensive system of analysis and training in sport that was designed top-to-bottom to produce world champions. Step one was to identify young talent. Soviet coaches scoured the country annually and tested elementary school children for physical ability. The idea was to find children with exceptional physical talents and then train them in sports that required those particular talents. A boy with exceptional leaping ability might be selected for training in basketball or the long jump; a girl with exceptional stamina might be selected for distance events in running or swimming Special schools were set up to provide essentially full-time training in particular sports. For boxing, young men who exhibited a combination of strength, quick reflexes, and stamina were the primary recruits.
Once the young athletes were enrolled in specialized schools for their sport, they were given intensive training of the highest quality. Coaching in the USSR was very advanced, and focused on every aspect of a given sport to ensure comprehensive preparation. For example, Soviet physiologists analyzed each physical element of the punches thrown by a boxer, and determined which muscles should be trained individually and in combination to produce maximum power and speed. Special training devices were invented that were unknown in the West – some of which seem like science fiction. Soviet boxers sometimes sparred against a mechanical “robot” that was powered by the boxer’s movement on a treadmill and threw punches at precise angles to help develop the fighter’s defensive reactions.
Most amateur boxers in the United States and elsewhere must find a way to support themselves financially in addition to training for their sport. Not so in the USSR, which catered to every need of its athletes and allowed them to focus exclusively on training. Many Soviet athletes were “officially” members of the military, although none of them ever dug a foxhole in the woods. The Soviet Army financed many sports teams, including the ice hockey teams that were unbeatable for decades, and the members of these teams had every advantage in the pursuit of excellence in their sports. While a fighter in Philadelphia might have to work as a janitor for eight hours before being able to go to the gym, his Soviet counterpart spent all of that time focusing on skills and fitness. In this respect, the Soviet-bloc fighters were often criticized in the West for actually being “professionals”, in that they clearly were boxing for a living and did so full-time. This claim is essentially true, but while this status may have been contrary to the spirit of “amateurism”, it was a fundamental part of Soviet success in developing world-class fighters.
Soviet fighters received thorough and repeated exposure to international competition. By the time a fighter from the USSR reached the Olympics, he often had more than a hundred amateur bouts against top-flight fighters from around the world. By contrast, American fighters generally were several years younger and had far less international exposure. The lure of money in the professional ranks usually resulted in young talent from the US turning pro as soon as possible, leaving huge gaps in experience between American amateurs and their Eastern-bloc counterparts. As most professional trainers will attest, the experience and skills-development imparted by an extensive amateur background can contribute greatly to success as a professional fighter. The Soviet fighters had this background in spades, but until recently were not afforded the opportunity to put it to the test against Western pros.
The current crop of Eastern European Heavyweight champions are all products of and benefited from this comprehensive system of training boxers. All three are from former republics of the USSR (Klitschko from Ukraine, Vaulev from Russia, and Liakhovich from Belarus), and their early developmental years as fighters came before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the same methods of recruiting and training boxers have been continued in the now-independent states. The respective rise of Klitschko, Vaulev, and Liakhovich (and perhaps Maskaev, from Uzbekistan) to the top of the Heavyweight division stands as stark proof of the effectiveness of the comprehensive approach to the development of fighters that was the hallmark of the Soviet sports system. There is much that can be learned even today from Soviet sports programs, and many “advanced” training ideas that are discussed are actually reiterations of techniques used in the Eastern-bloc dating all the way back to the 1950s.
If you are interested in more detail on the Soviet system of sports development, some excellent books on the subject are Secrets of Soviet Sports and Fitness by Michael Yessis and The Soviet Road to Olympus by N. N. Schneidman. These books can be a challenge to find, but they are worth the effort and provide an insightful look at sports behind The Iron Curtain.
WGG