Archaeological and documented evidence suggests boxing had existed in the Mediterranean since around 1500 BC, when boxing was documented in ancient Egypt and Greece.
First accepted as an Olympic sport in 688 BC, participants trained on punching bags. Fighters wore leather straps over their hands, wrists, and sometimes breast, to protect them from injury. The straps left their fingers free.
Eventually, fist fighting became so popular that even aristocrats started fighting, but the practice was eventually banned by the Caesar Augustus. In 500 A.D., the sport was banned altogether by christian Theodoric the Great.
After decades the art of Boxing re-emerged in Asia and Europe, and over the centuries it continued to evolve as a sport and grow in popularity. In 1743, a London based organization implemented official rules to protect the safety of the contestants. In 1867 lightweight, middleweight and heavyweight divisions were first used and rules were modified resembling the rules of today.
With the gradual acceptance of formalized rules, two distinct branches of boxing emerged; Professional Boxing and Olympic Boxing.
Olympic (or Amateur) boxing has a point scoring system rather than physical damage or knockouts. Bouts comprise of four or three two-minute rounds, with a one-minute interval between rounds.
Competitors wear protective headgear and gloves with a white strip across the knuckle. A punch is considered a scoring punch only when the boxers connect with the white portion of the gloves. Each punch that lands on the head or torso is awarded a point if it is awarded by three judges within 1 second of each other, otherwise no point is awarded. A boxing referee monitors the fight to ensure that competitors use only legal blows. Referees also ensure that the boxers use only legal holding tactics (clinching) to prevent the opponent from swinging.
Referees will stop the bout if a boxer is seriously injured, if one boxer is significantly dominating the other or if the score is severely imbalanced.
