Boxing

Boxing is a combat sport in which two competitors wearing padded gloves throw punches at each other for a series of timed rounds. Pugilism is documented in Egyptian and Sumerian art as early as the third millennium BC, and it was included in the ancient Olympic Games from 688 BC. Modern boxing developed in England: the champion Jack Broughton drew up the first widely used code of rules in 1743, and the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, published in 1867 and drafted by John Graham Chambers, introduced padded gloves and timed rounds and remain the direct basis of boxing as practiced today. Bouts are contested within a weight class, from lighter divisions such as flyweight up through heavyweight, so that opponents meet at broadly comparable size and reach; a standard round lasts three minutes, with a one-minute rest between rounds, and a contest runs three rounds at the Olympic amateur level or up to twelve rounds in a professional world title fight. A bout is won by knockout or technical knockout (the referee stopping the contest), or, if it goes the distance, on points awarded by ringside judges scoring each round, most commonly under the ten-point-must system in which the round winner receives ten points and the loser nine or fewer. Unlike most sports in this atlas, professional boxing today has no single global sanctioning body; several competing organizations recognize their own versions of world championships, a fragmentation genuinely distinct from the sport's own governance history.