Competitive Balance in Olympic Boxing: 1904-2012

Beginning with the seminal work in the field now known as sports economics (Rottenberg, 1956), concern over competitive balance has been a recurring theme. While the vast majority of the focus has been on popular professional team sports, a few studies have analyzed competitive balance in the individual sports of professional tennis (del Corral, 2009) and NASCAR (von Allmen, 2001; Berkowitz, Depken II and Wilson, 2011). However, only brief and qualitative mention is given to issues of competitive balance in professional boxing (Sanderson and Siegfried, 2003; Tenorio, 2006), and the topic is only broached tangentially for amateur boxing in a study of home-field advantage in the Summer Olympic Games (Balmer, Nevill and Williams, 2003). This study marks the first comprehensive quantitative analysis of competitive balance in amateur boxing. The statistical themes emerging are 1) A general trend towards greater competitive balance over time; 2) A statistically-significant improvement overall in competitive balance in the post-WW II era and 3) When comparing annual frequency of championships, 1998-2008, for the four main American team sports with the last ten Summer Olympic Games, the degree of competitive imbalance was by far the worst in Olympic Boxing.

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