Puerto Padre (Cuba), 1952

By Pablo Alabarces

One of the greatest Latin American boxers, Stevenson competed in his first Olympics in Munich in 1972. In the round of 16, he faced the heavy favorite for the gold medal, the American Duane Bobick, who had defeated him a year earlier at the Pan American Games in Cali, Colombia. The Cuban won the rematch without much complication, soon securing the gold medal. The second gold medal would come in 1976 at the Montreal Games. Perhaps Stevenson faced his only difficulty in the final bout, when Romanian Mircea Simon tried to escape imminent defeat by constantly moving around the ring during the first two rounds. This allowed him to evade the champion’s powerful punches, but the decisive blow characteristic of Stevenson eventually landed, knocking out Simon.

The attributes of the Cuban boxer did not go unnoticed by professional boxing promoters. They offered him enormous sums to abandon amateurism, which would necessarily require him to leave Cuba. At the end of the Munich Olympics (1972), he was reportedly offered $3 million for a professional fight, but he dryly and proudly stated that he “preferred the ten million applauses of the people of his country.” As a reward for his sports dedication and patriotic fervor, Fidel Castro’s government always granted him numerous privileges. Due to disagreements over the number of rounds and the appropriate venue, the highly anticipated fight between Stevenson and another boxing star, American Muhammad Ali, could never be organized.

In Moscow (1980), the Cuban won his third Olympic gold medal, becoming the second boxer in the world to achieve this feat, but the first in a single division. Stevenson could have won his fourth gold medal, but the boycott by socialist countries of the Los Angeles Games (1984) interrupted his trajectory. In addition to the three Olympic titles, he secured a triple world championship in Havana (1974), Belgrade (1978), and Reno (1986). He ended his career with only ten losses in over 170 fights.