THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD

HERE has never been a more tumultuous road to an Olympics. The Tokyo Games were postponed for a year and now the European qualification event, suspended mid tournament in March 2020, picks up from where it left off. It restarts June 4, running until June 8, at Le Grand Dôme in Villebon-sur-Yvette on the outskirts of Paris, France. The restructuring of the qualifying process, enforced by the coronavirus pandemic, means that there won’t be a second one. The World event, for those who hadn’t qualified through their continent, had to be cancelled. It means those remaining Olympic quota places will be allocated simply on the Boxing Task Force’s world ranking system. For the boxers most highly ranked within their continent that is good news, they are likely to be granted a place at the Games through that second wave of allocations. But for those who do not already have a high world ranking, everything comes down to