RIO DE JANEIRO — Olympic boxing has taken on a new look. In the 2016 Summer Games, there is a revised point system, the inclusion of a number of professional fighters and, perhaps most noticeably, the elimination of head guards for male boxers.
The removal of the gear for the first time in more than three decades is based on a counterintuitive and debatable premise — that the boxers will be safer without the extra protection.
The head guards were added at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 in reaction to especially brutal moments in the ring, all of them on the professional level and one of them leading to a death.