Middleweight heavyweight category – Newspaper Kommersant No. 163 (7364) dated 09/06/2022

Boris Lagutin died at the age of 85. He was the first of the domestic boxers to become a two-time Olympic champion, but among the other representatives of the Lagutin genre, not only these victories in 1964 and 1968 are distinguished, but also the eccentricity of his biography and talent.

Not a single rating of the best boxers can do without Boris Lagutin, who were previously called amateurs, implying that there is also professional boxing, one that is outside the Olympic universe. Usually in such classifications, two or three grandiose legends are ahead of him, no more – Cubans Teofilo Stevenson and Felix Savon, Hungarian Laszlo Papp, that is, those who managed to win the Olympics three times. Lagutin has two such victories. And this is also a colossal achievement for a genre in which competition is huge and in which a career, its peak part in any case, does not last, as a rule, for long. Suffice it to say that the next two-time Olympic champions in domestic boxing, although he regularly brought out exceptionally talented athletes who had no opportunity, having enjoyed amateur success, followed the example of Western rivals to become professionals, to territory forbidden for the Soviet fighter, had to wait several decades. Only Oleg Saitov repeated the trick of Boris Lagutin in 2000 and Alexei Tishchenko in 2008.

But it’s not just a formal reason.

Boris Lagutin was an undoubted sports titan, as powerful as the weightlifter Yury Vlasov, the athlete Valery Brumel, the football player Lev Yashin, who won in the same era with him – the idols of a huge country, who were insanely popular both within its borders and beyond.

His style was a reference, as if created in order to later teach young boxers how to keep the distance correctly, how not to let the opponent use his trump cards, how to choose the moment for a blow – maybe not the strongest in appearance, but for timing resulting in a knockout or at least a deep knockdown. And his life completely refuted the stereotypes about what the path to triumph and becoming a standard should be.

Surprisingly, Boris Lagutin came to the boxing section at the Moscow Wings of the Soviets at the age of 17. And neither his physical data (and he, in principle, did not look too much like an athlete), nor his restrained character shouted that a young man who became interested in sports late was able to compensate for the lag behind his peers. However, three years later, Lagutin, who competed in middleweight (up to 71 kg), already coped with the best boxers of the USSR, and five years later, in 1960, he was able to qualify for the Olympic team in Rome. On it, he reached the semifinals, losing in an absolutely equal fight to the American Wilbert McClure and getting bronze, so that after the Italian tournament he would adjust his approach to preparation and train like a damned one almost around the clock.

Four years later, at the Tokyo Olympics, having already managed to take two gold medals at the European Championships (there were no world championships at that time), Lagutin did not make the same mistakes: five fights – five convincing wins, including in the final against the Frenchman Joseph Gonzalez. But the story of his second Olympic gold is still much more curious and dramatic.

After the Tokyo Olympics, Boris Lagutin, already almost a veteran by the standards of amateur boxing, seems to have decided that he had had enough of sports exploits.

He was much more interested in sports than studying at the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University. He entered the ring infrequently, and the exits raised doubts that he would be able to go again to the main competition for the Soviet boxer. In the USSR, another chic middleweight matured – virtuoso Viktor Ageev, to whom Lagutin himself promised the gold of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

But an emergency happened. Impulsive, unlike his older comrade, Ageev was suspended from the national team before the Olympic Games for a fight after a party in a cafe, and the middleweight vacancy was given to Lagutin. He went to Mexico City in the status of definitely not a favorite: there is not enough top-level practice, and 30 years old is already too solid for great achievements. And in the final, there was no point in betting on Boris Lagutin at all. He was opposed by the Cuban Rolando Garbey – 21-year-old, but already having a reputation as an undisputed star, tough, fast, tireless, confident that he knows how to cope with any fighter, especially one as thoroughly studied as Lagutin.

For the entire Cuban team, that final was a shock. Garbey, who confidently started it, gave the impression of a predator about to tear his prey to pieces, but soon, attacking a seemingly slightly apathetic and inert opponent, he ran into an imperceptible blow that sent him to the floor. And attempts after the knockdown to raise the pace, to unbalance the cold-blooded Lagutin, did not lead to anything. The final, third round looked like beating the Cuban, although, in theory, freshness was his advantage. But no, and in this aspect, the unique Soviet boxer took over, who, having won the Mexican gold, said goodbye to sports and plunged headlong into social work. Part of it was the organization of the main tournament for young men in the USSR and Russia – a tournament for the prizes of Boris Lagutin. There was nothing strange in the fact that these competitions got his name: in the end, no one fit better than him in the idea of ​​​​the ideal boxer anyway.

Alexey Dospekhov