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Female boxers hoping to make it to Olympics some day

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — Marlen Esparza has the resume to box for Team USA at the Beijing Olympics.

Just 18 years old, she has an amateur record of 40-1 in the 106-pound weight division along with three national titles. Esparza, fighting this weekend at the Women's National Golden Gloves tournament in Hollywood Beach, has boxed for her country at international tournaments in Ecuador and India and will compete in two more international events this year.

But Esparza, from Houston, won't be going to Beijing next month. Women's boxing isn't offered at the Olympics, and never has been.

"It's not an Olympic sport yet, but it's something that I have my mind set on, that I'm going to win a medal," Esparza said. "Right now as a sport, we're just barely hanging in there, but being in the Olympics would make us something. I have to just believe that it's going to happen."

Of the 30 sports offered to men at the 2008 Games, boxing is the only one not also offered to women. That list includes contact sports such as wrestling, judo, Tae Kwan Do and fencing. Synchronized swimming is offered for women, but not men.

"They've got badminton in the Olympics," said Bonnie Canino, a co-organizer for this weekend's Golden Gloves tournament. "I mean, badminton. Come on."

In 2005, the International Olympic Committee voted against women's boxing for the 2008 Games, saying it "did not feel it has reached the stage where it merits inclusion."

There will be another vote next year for the 2012 London Olympics and the women have their fingers crossed.

"If they say no this time, I'm about to cry right now thinking about it," Esparza said.

For years, women were banned from boxing as amateurs in the U.S., but they finally won the right in court in 1993.

Christy Halbert, a chairperson on the USA Boxing women's task force and developer of the Web site LetThemBox.org, said the number of registered women in USA Boxing has risen from about 577 in 1995 to 2,500 in 2008.

Today, U.S. women have four national tournaments each year — the Golden Gloves, USA Boxing, Police Athletic League and Armed Forces — and even international competition, like the AIBA Women's World Championships this November in China.

But without Olympic designation, it remains mostly a grass-roots sport. Sponsorship opportunities are limited, Halbert said, and most fighters pay their way to compete.

One father from out of town said he spent $3,000 for his daughter to compete this weekend in Hollywood. Even the tournament organizers put up most of their own money, and hope to break even by the end of the competition.

That would change if women's boxing becomes on Olympic sport, said Yvonne Reis, a co-organizer of the Golden Gloves tournament.

"The men get all the funding, because the women aren't part of the USOC," Reis said. "We'd like to just make this (the Golden Gloves Nationals) an international women's tournament, and say, 'screw the Olympics.'"

USA Boxing board member Tom Virgets said the biggest obstacle for women's Olympic boxing is the IOC caps the number of participants at each Olympics. If women's boxing were added, another sport would likely have to be eliminated, he said. Baseball and softball already are scheduled to be eliminated in 2012, but that doesn't automatically make room for women's boxing.

Still, Virgets is confident.

"I fully expect that women will be included in the 2012 Olympics," he said.

Another problem is that women's boxing has up to 16 weight classes, but the men will have 11 at Beijing.

Halbert said that starting in 2009, women will reduce the number of weight classes and will align all other rules in accordance with men's boxing.

She's cautiously optimistic that will help turn the IOC's vote in 2009.

"But I don't tell a lot of boxers that, because I don't want to get their hopes up," she said from her office in Nashville. But "the Olympics is the world's largest and most prestigious event, and women boxers deserve to do this."

Ben Volin writes for The Palm Beach Post.