Amanda Serrano Vacates WBC Featherweight Title

Amanda Serrano Vacates WBC Featherweight Title

It was always a case of when and not if Amanda Serrano would vacant her WBC featherweight bauble, and now she has.

“Moving forward, if a sanctioning body doesn’t want to give me and my fellow fighters the choice to fight the same as the men, then I will not be fighting for that sanctioning body. The WBC has refused to evolve the sport for equality. So, I am relinquishing their title.” Amanda Serrano

Serrano recently beat Danila Ramos over 12 x 3-minute rounds to retain her undisputed world featherweight titles, and she has insisted that any future opponents must agree to fight her at the exact same duration. Her days of fighting the shorter, more accepted duration appear over.

Mauricio Sulaiman, the president of the WBC, recently reiterated their stance that all female fights will remain as they are at present. You can justifiably criticise plenty of the decisions reached by Sulaiman and the WBC. Or, in many cases, the lack of a decision. But there is at least some basis to their argument as to why the WBC steadfastly sticks with 10 x 2-minute rounds for female fights that fall into their jurisdiction. Based on the following comments by the WBC president, that position is unlikely to change anytime soon. If ever.

“Women physiologically are different than men. So there’s 85 per cent more concussions in women than men, and this is researched on soccer, football, baseball, and basketball, and this is medical data. It is also reported that fatigue and dehydration are major factors for sustaining an injury.

“With all this information, we just simply rectify that female boxing will never be more than 10 rounds in the WBC and will never be for 3 minutes. It will be for two minutes only to avoid dehydration and fatigue, which are higher risks for female fighters.”

I am all in for equality, and you can’t completely dismiss the idea that one day women’s boxing will fall into total harmony with the men’s side of the game. But that push for total equality shouldn’t be rushed in my opinion and certainly not at the risk of safety for the fighters. Only a quick Google search will find the words of Sulaiman hold at least some semblance of truth and balance. Studies, especially in horse racing, do seem to indicate that women are at more risk of concussion-related injuries. And if that is indeed proven beyond a reasonable doubt, equality shouldn’t even be in the conversation. And it shouldn’t be until we have a definitive answer.

Boxing with its history of brain trauma-related injuries and the very nature of the sport should tell all concerned that it needs to move ahead with extreme caution and not with reckless abandon. To rush into extending ring time in all-female bouts on a wider scale, without further studies and intensive research, is incredibly risky and could do more damage than good in the long term.

We have gone from 20 minutes to 36 minutes, almost double the amount of ring time, in one stroke of a pen. In this observer’s view, 12 x 2-minute rounds would have been an initially safer route to take. In MMA, a much-documented, if slightly misleading comparison, the women admittedly follow the same rules as their male counterparts. But they would only fight a maximum of 25 minutes with their 5 x 5-minute main events. Eleven minutes less than what Serrano and Ramos fought not so long ago in that ‘historic’ fight in Florida.

What did that Serrano Ramos fight really tell us? It was pretty obviously a one-sided fight. There was little expectation that the fight would be anywhere near competitive, and I just saw it as Ramos taking another sixteen minutes of unnecessary punishment. It wasn’t the fight to start to start a revolution with. And while everything has to start somewhere, I don’t think it does the female side of the sport any favours by Serrano doing her thing and everyone else doing something completely different. In many ways, we all need to be on the same page. Don’t be fooled into thinking that every female fighter is in favour of fighting 3-minute rounds. Because they most definitely are not.

But above anything else, safety should be paramount, and the sport needs some immediate and extensive studies to be conducted before the sport moves in a direction it is simply not ready for. Sometimes, progress can be achieved by caution and not haste.