WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman has made the bold proposition that there should be as many as six judges working the undisputed heavyweight championship fight between WBA, WBO, IBF and Ring Magazine champion Oleksandr Usyk 21-0 (14) and WBC titleholder Tyson Fury 34-0-1 (24) at Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on May 18.
Explaining his position, Sulaiman said that his only intention is “to make sure there’s no controversy”.
“Boxing is a sport in which change is very difficult to get. We’re purists, traditionalists, we don’t want changes,” Sulaiman said to Sky Sports.
“I will continue to make the proposal. Some like the idea, some of the people in the decision-making process. We will see.
“We had proposed to use five judges, or six judges. However that was not considered. It did not happen. I would still recommend [it].
“We do have a remote scoring system which is used for training and evaluating ring officials from all over the world. They score live in the WBC system that we developed.
“We have found through fights done in this system that the more officials that score a fight, the less possibility of a wrong decision.
“Anybody can have a bad night. If you have one judge have a bad night and the two others get it correct, you still save the fight.
“You have two judges with a difficult fight and then one round can shift the whole result. But if you have more officials then the possibility of a wrong score goes to a minimum. But we will see.
“That’s the only intention to make sure there’s no controversy.
“Now we have the biggest fight in 25 years in the heavyweight division. So we have to try to do our best.”
Professional boxing has long used three ringside judges to score a bout and it seems unlikely that Sulaiman will receive much support for his proposal, but he is sticking with it.
Another innovation Sulaiman would like to see implemented for Usyk vs Fury is the use of video replays.
“I believe it will happen, now that the fight has been postponed until May 18, three months from now, we will look into it,” Sulaiman said.
“The initial idea was to put together specific guidelines of the usage of instant replay and we’re in that process. So we’re going to work with the producers of the feed to see what equipment and what communications are needed, what the review panel will be, just go into details.
“As an example we did instant replay in the UK with Charlie Edwards and [Julio Cesar] Martinez and we just did instant replay in Fury-[Francis] Ngannou when Fury was cut, the referee he didn’t see any action that made the cut, ruled it a punch and then the British Boxing Board of Control and myself looked at the screen, the big screen in the stadium and saw the head butt so we called it officially a headbutt.
“But the idea of having the possibility of reviewing a major controversial happening inside the ring, to make the right decision, the right call at the time is basically it.
“To have the absolute certainty that there will not be a controversy. That in a fight of this magnitude would be absolutely unacceptable.”
