Boxing 

Boxing is a combat sport in which two people, usually wearing protective gloves, throw punches at each other for a predetermined amount of time in a boxing ring. Amateur boxing is both an Olympic and Commonwealth Games sport and is a standard fixture in most international games—it also has its own World Championships.

Boxing, sport, both amateur and professional, involving attack and defense with the fists. Boxers usually wear padded gloves and generally observe the code set forth in the marquess of Queensberry rules. Matched in weight and ability, boxing contestants try to land blows hard and often with their fists, each attempting to avoid the blows of the opponent. A boxer wins a match either by outscoring the opponent—points can be tallied in several ways—or by rendering the opponent incapable of continuing the match. Bouts range from 3 to 12 rounds, each round normally lasting three minutes.

Early years

Boxing first appeared as a formal olympic event in the 23rd olympiad (688 BCE), but fist-fighting contests must certainly have had their origin in mankind’s prehistory. The earliest visual evidence for boxing appears in Sumerian relief carvings from the 3rd millennium BCE. A relief sculpture from egyptian Thebes (c. 1350 BCE) shows both boxers and spectators. The few extant Middle Eastern and Egyptian depictions are of bare-fisted contests with, at most, a simple band supporting the wrist; the earliest evidence of the use of gloves or hand coverings in boxing is a carved vase from Minoan crete (c. 1500 BCE) that shows helmeted boxers wearing a stiff plate strapped to the fist.