Doing research for sports

Several readers and colleagues from the De La Salle Ramon V. del Rosario Sr. Graduate School of Business took interest in the research article, “Do judges enhance home advantage in European championship boxing” that I used as reference in last week’s column on controversies in subjective sports. They all expressed amazement at how sport, in the first place, and the judging aspects of boxing, in the second place, became topics of scholarly and rigorous inquiry.

I stated that sport is just like any science and body of knowledge that evolves through research and inquiry. I added that if sport (and any other human endeavor, for that matter) is to really make progress in our country, we must do our respectable share of creative research in accordance with our resources and not treat sport like it was just one endless series of games and competitions.

At any rate, the paper, which appeared in the April 2005 issue of the Journal of Sports Sciences, concluded that “home advantage is more prevalent in sports that involve subjective decision-making and that interventions should be designed to help judges to counter home advantage effects.”

The authors of the paper, N.J. Balmer of the Research Institute for Sport and Exercise Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University and A.M. Nevill and A.M.Lane, both of the School of Sports, Performing Arts and Leisure, University of Wolverhampton, Walsall, United Kingdom, state that there have been many examples of contentious points decisions in boxing. Boxing is scored subjectively by judges and referees scoring each round of the contest. The authors assessed whether the probability of a home win (and therefore home advantage) increased when bouts ended up in decisions in points rather than knockouts.

One such contentious decision according to the authors was the heavyweight world championship fight between Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis on March 13, 1999 which ended in a draw despite the overwhelmingly pro-Lewis scorecards of fight commentators and the feeling of the general public that Lewis had won. This bout in particular led to the National Association of Attorneys General Boxing Task Force to suggest a change in the scoring system from the current “10-points must system” to a “consensus scoring system,” where the median score of the three judges for each round is adopted.

Similarly, although the current study involves only professional boxing, amateur and particularly Olympic boxing have also provoked considerable controversy over officiating and have also prompted rule changes. For example, during the 1988 Seoul Olympics, highly contentious decisions led to the International Amateur Boxing Association making a number of reforms for Barcelona 1992.

Perhaps, the most famous controversy was that in the bout between Roy Jones Jr. and Park Si-hun. Jones lost his light middleweight gold medal bout, 3-2, despite thoroughly outclassing his Korean opponent Park Si-hun. In fact, Park was awarded a number of questionable decisions throughout the tournament, with some commentators partly attributing this to the attack upon the referee in the earlier bout between Byun Jong-Il and Alexander Hristov. The embarrassment of the Seoul Olympics and particularly the Jones bout led to the initiation of electronic push button scoring for Barcelona 1992 which itself led to a number of dubious decisions.

The paper states that there is considerable evidence of officiating bias in subjectively judged events, including Olympic diving, figure skating and gymnastics. Interestingly, this bias seems to have changed little across time despite considerable interest in the issue, notably at the 1978 World Figure Skating Championships were the USSR judging delegation was suspended as a result of such bias.

In terms of methodology, the authors collated all European championships from March 1910 to June 2002 across all weight divisions. Data were taken from the boxing records archive available online at www.boxrec.com. Evidently, to be useful in analysis, bouts required a home and away competitor. Home competitors were defined as those whose nationality matched the location of the bout.

European championship bouts were chosen above world title fights as European bouts tended not to be dominated by a single nation (mainly the USA) and bouts are generally contested in the home country of one of the boxers (many world title fights are fought in the USA regardless of the nationality of the boxers). Other refinements were made resulting in a sample of 788 bouts across all years and weight divisions.