Traveling Rocky’s Road

Without the Olympics, Rocky Juarez would be just another boxer about to become another notch on the belt of veteran champion Marco Antonio Barrera.

Without the Olympics, the Juarez story line for the main event Saturday night at Staples Center would focus on a long-shot challenger from the hard streets of Houston, learning the fight game from his still-living 94-year-old grandfather and getting through his first 26 pro matches with only one loss.

Without the Olympics, Barrera and his advisors might not even have given Juarez a second look, much less a title shot in the World Boxing Council’s super-featherweight division.

The 2000 Sydney Games, and Ricardo “Rocky” Juarez, are historically linked. Juarez went wanting to become Oscar De La Hoya, and returned having become Roy Jones.

On Oct. 1, 2000, the last day of the Olympics, he fought for the featherweight gold medal, lost it to a fighter from Kazakhstan named Bekzat Sattarkhanov and was reduced, in his despair, to grabbing it backstage before the medal ceremonies and clutching it for a few seconds.

“There were females carrying the medals and I saw the gold and the silver and the two bronze,” Juarez said. “I just went over, picked up the gold and told myself, ‘This was supposed to be mine.’ Just looking at it there, I had to touch it.”

The Juarez final remains one of the more bizarre boxing matches in Olympic history. Unlike Jones’ loss in Korea on an obviously biased decision, Juarez’s loss was more complicated and, in many ways, still not sorted out by international officials.

Juarez, who fell behind early, was the victim of what seemed to be unwarranted and obstructive holding and clinching. A review of films of the fight shows Sattarkhanov holding and clutching at least nine times. Standard procedure is for the referee, in this case Stanislav Kirsanov of Russia, to make the boxers break and fight.

According to Gary Toney, the American boxing team leader, Kirsanov did not do his job.

“I counted nine times that the referee cautioned the fighter from Kazakhstan,” Toney was quoted as saying the next day in the New York Times. “After the third caution, he is supposed to issue a warning and deduct two points. After the fifth caution for holding, he should have disqualified the fighter.”

In Olympic boxing in 2000, points were scored by five judges sitting ringside, each of whom hit a keyboard when they clearly saw a punch land. If the majority scored a punch, the computer accepted it and a point was given. Juarez remembered being behind by “10 or 11 points” entering the third round of the four-round bout.

“But in the third round, I got it to within four or five points,” Juarez said. “But then he started holding. I figured he was giving up, that he knew I was coming.

“My corner was yelling at the ref, and I remember the other fighter saying something to the ref in his language, but all the ref said was something back in Russian. It was kind of like he was telling him ‘break,’ and ‘box,’ but he never did, and the ref never made him.”

When it was over, and the final score of 22-14 had been seen on enough TV screens around the arena that Juarez knew he had lost, he said he had to battle a new opponent -- his emotions.

“My coach put my hood on, told me we lost and told me to do what I had to do,” Juarez said. “I remember thinking that I wasn’t going to lose like this without taking a stance. I walked around the ring, wondering what I should do.

“I remember thinking about not taking this loss like this. I remembered representing my country when I won the world championships, and how that felt. I remember in the world championships there was a fighter who didn’t accept his decision and just stayed in the ring, and delayed it for lots of others.

“And then I came to the point where I decided I just had to take it. I’ve never been a crybaby. I finally decided that I knew I had not been given the chance to fight, the chance to win. I had to fight more than one person.”

Having decided to take the high road, Juarez faced one more trying moment.

“I went out for the announcement of the decision, and I kept my hood up over my head,” he said. “I felt I had failed my country, and my Mexican American heritage. Then, before the ref raised the other fighter’s hand, he made me take my hood off, and I felt more disgrace. Now, more than ever, everybody could see my face, my disappointment.”

Several hours after the fight, with Toney lodging a protest, a press release was passed out announcing that Kirsanov had been suspended from working international boxing events for four years.

The fight result stood, however. By the time of the announcement, all international boxing officials had left the arena. Sattarkhanov headed back to Kazakhstan, where he received a $100,000 bonus for winning gold.

Juarez went to the dressing room and destroyed a locker with a right hand. It wasn’t until he got home to Houston a day later that he was told Kirsanov had been suspended.

Kirsanov is 67 now, lives in Novosibirsk, Russia, and has a different view of what took place that day.

“I remember this fight quite well,” he said in a recent interview. “Not only because it was a memorable fight, but mainly because it was followed by a very unpleasant scandal.

“The then-general secretary of the International Boxing Federation [AIBA], an American whose name I don’t recall [the late Loring Baker], raised a big scandal after that fight, accusing me of refereeing in favor of the Kazakh fighter. But even if you wanted to do what you can do in the ring, [you can’t] because points then were awarded by the five judges at the side of the ring.

“Before the fight, the federation officials and Anwar Chowdhry [head of AIBA] himself instructed us that those were the final Olympic fights and we referees in the ring should give the boxers more freedom to have a good fight.”

Kirsanov said that, at the insistence of Baker, the judges took away his referee’s passport, but the next day returned it, stamped with the words, “very good.” He said he took that as an assessment of his performance.

“I was never officially disqualified.” he said. “And how could Chowdhry break this news to me if it didn’t happen and Chowdhry himself was confident that the refereeing of that fight was not misconducted.”

Kirsanov acknowledged that, “probably stemming from that conflict,” he did not work an international fight for four years, but added that he still works fights from time to time and is “sometimes invited to referee abroad.”

“I have nothing to be ashamed of,” he said of the Juarez fight. “I refereed that fight in a proper way.”

In Lausanne, Switzerland, Ismail Osman, chairman of AIBA’s referee/judges commission, disputed that.

Not only had Kirsanov “acted very poor, as he was not neutral and biased against the American boxer,” Osman said, but Kirsanov had, indeed, been suspended for four years. He remains on that suspended list, even though the four years have passed.

“Concerning Mr. Stanislav’s [sic] words of receiving his international passport stamped with ‘very good,’ I would like to verify that the evaluation is conducted to his situation as a judge through the computer system, whereas the suspension was conducted due to his work as a referee. He was not invited to any international boxing championships for four years.”

Osman also said that Baker’s influence was as one of 31 members of the board acting on these matters, and added that no boxing referee or judge who worked in previous Olympics would be asked to work in the 2008 Games in Bejing.

So Kirsanov will not be back in the Olympics, and Juarez has moved on in his professional boxing life, which began with a unanimous decision in a bout shown on Showtime Jan. 13, 2001.

That was three months and 13 days after his Olympic final. It was also 14 days after Sattarkhanov, the fighter who had the gold medal Juarez wanted so badly, died in an automobile accident in Kazakhstan, on his way to a New Year’s Eve party.

Times staff writer Sergei Loiko contributed to this report from Moscow.