Boxing Clever

In recent years, women boxers from Taiwan have repeat­edly won medals in international competition. At the Tokyo Olympics there were five weight classes for women’s boxing, and Taiwan had women qualify in four of them. Huang Hsiao-wen says: “In the last few years we have seen the successes of the previous generation of women boxers from Taiwan such as Lin Yu-ting and Chen Nien-chin, and today when you talk about Asian powers in women’s boxing, everyone mentions mainland China, Kazakhstan, and India, followed by Taiwan.”

A normal training day for coach and athlete. Liu Tsung-tai is like a second father to Huang Hsiao-wen, and has been at her side in important moments in her life.

Hardcore pre-Olympic training

Before going to Tokyo, Huang was already ranked number one in the world by the International Boxing Associ­ation (AIBA) in the 54-kilogram weight class of women boxers. But there was no 54-kg class at these Olympics, so she had to switch to the 51-kg class (flyweight). To do this she had to undergo rigorous weight control. The 177-­centimeter-tall Huang says, “This was really hard for me.”

“In the past it was my custom to only start losing weight two weeks before an event, so I wouldn’t be tired and ­hungry for such a long time. But by doing this I wasn’t able to perform at my best in competitions.” Therefore, starting in December of 2020, she followed a program set out by a team of sports scientists and nutritionists from the Sports Science and Research Depart­ment at the National Sports Training Center (NSTC) to lose one kilo per month, so as to keep her body in shape to ­handle a heavy training regi­men and stay in tip-top fighting ­condition.

Weight control was only the first obstacle. The fourth and third weeks before the competition were the period when her training was most intensive. Huang’s coach, Liu Tsung-tai, deliberately increased the difficulty of her training, with basic physical fitness workouts in the mornings and sparring in the afternoons. Liu believed that the volume of her training needed to exceed the three rounds (nine minutes of fighting) of an Olympic bout many times over to enable her to handle the rigors of the competition. Then there were opponent simulations and situational simulations, and Liu helped her to hone details like striking force, footwork, postures, and speed.

During the final two weeks prior to the competition, the emphasis was on polishing Huang’s technique. Ana­lysis by the NSTC team showed that she was very likely to come up against some southpaws, so Liu Tsung-tai arranged in advance for suitable sparring partners to simulate this type of fight. This period enabled Huang to prepare for the challenges of any style of opponent. It was this extremely arduous training program that enabled Huang Hsiao-wen to stand up proudly in the inter­national boxing ring.

Huang sports a number of eye-catching tattoos on her left arm. The earliest was “Taiwan,” because she hoped that each time she threw a punch with that hand it would tell people where she comes from. Above her collarbone is body ink reading “Boxer girl, remember why you started.” This was a gift from her father, a tattoo artist, to remind her to “never forget your original purpose.”

Boxing has given Huang Hsiao-wen confidence and enabled her to compete in the Olympics. She has learned to enjoy the process of each bout. (courtesy of Sports Administration, Ministry of Education)

Self-confidence through boxing

Huang’s boxing career started at Taipei’s Lan-Zhou Junior High School, where she met coach Liu Tsung-tai. Separ­ated from her parents at a young age, she was raised by her grandfather. Boxing gave her self-­confidence: “When the referee raises your hand in victory, I personally feel that this is an affirmation of the work I’ve put in.”

“She’s an out-boxer with speed and technique,” says Liu. She has a height advantage, and though she has only moderate strength she can make up for that with speed. Her excellent technique comes from the solid ­basic training she has put in, starting in junior high school. “You also have to take into account her self-discipline.” Huang is the type of competitor who always arrives at training sessions early, and it is this self-discipline which has turned her into a medal-winning Olympic athlete.

Huang is absolutely dedicated to fighting again in the Olympics, which will next be held in Paris in 2024.

Enjoying the process of a fight

Under Liu’s tutelage Huang, who once considered winning or losing the most important thing, has learned to enjoy the fun of boxing.

Once in an international competition Huang was up against an Olympic silver medalist. The night before the bout, Liu sent her a text message: “You have to be a steady fighter, and you must trust yourself and be positive about yourself.” Although Huang lost, “I really enjoyed the process of that fight. I brought all my skills into play, and in the third round I even got scores of ten from two judges, which showed the judges’ affirmation of my abilities.”

In the critical semifinal match in Tokyo, Huang was up against the Turkish boxer Buse Naz Cakiroglu, who was the top seed in these games and the European champion. “I had seen her performance in the past, and I really wanted to have the chance to fight her, as I felt I should do all right.” Huang kept this remark of her coach in mind: “The process is more important than the result.” “Losing means that in some way I wasn’t good enough, so the only thing to do is improve those aspects and make myself better.”

A second father

A few days after Huang won her Olympic bronze medal, it was Father’s Day in Taiwan. On her Facebook page she expressed her gratitude to her “second father,” coach Liu Tsung-tai. “Without him, I think I would have wanted to give up on boxing,” says Huang.

The year Huang began senior high school, she lost a bout by a single point, which affected her greatly. For nearly a year, she avoided the gym and avoided the ring. It was Liu who brought the runaway Huang back to the sport. He asked her to come back to the gym and enter the qualifying competition for selection of national team members, and in 2013 she comfortably became a national team competitor, putting her life on a new track.

Liu is the person who cares most about Huang. In 2018, while competing in the Asian Games in Jakarta, she fractured a bone in the sole of her right foot. She hung in there and finished the fight, qualifying to go through to the gold medal match. But in view of her condition Liu decided to withdraw her from the rest of the competition, so that she came away with only a bronze medal. “He really took into account my future career as a boxer. If he had not made that decision on the day, would I have been able to fight my way into this Olympics?” wonders Huang. She rested for six months after her injury, and Liu was with her every step of the way through her rehabilitation. In 2019, having returned to competition, Huang won a gold medal at the Women’s World Boxing Championships in Ulan-Ude, Russia.

When she is in the ring with an opponent, Huang can hear her coach’s instructions through the noise of the crowd and react at once with a counterpunch. This is the kind of chemistry that exists between this coach and this athlete, showing that every fight is fought by both of them together.

Prepping for 2024

In preparing for the Tokyo Olympics, both Huang and Liu say that the Tokyo 2020 Gold Plan of the Ministry of Education’s Sports Administration was enormously helpful. First, there are dedicated athletic trainers to provide immediate help in the event of injury, and second there was help in finding training partners. It was not easy to find a sparring partner for someone of Huang’s height and strength, and Liu had to invite male boxers from Taiwan to train with her. Also, they knew that the majority of the boxers in Huang’s 51-kg weight class in Tokyo would be left-handed. The Gold Plan provided support for overseas training, enabling her to spar with different opponents and gain experience.

Liu explains that traditional training is by no means unimportant, but if you want to win a medal in international boxing today it can only make up 30% of total training, while the other 70% must be done using modern techniques. For the Tokyo Games, specialized data from the NSTC Sports Science and Research Depart­ment team meant that competing for a medal at the Olympics was no longer simply a matter of grind and hard work, but was also founded in data analysis. For example, it was possible to analyze how many times per round a given op­ponent attacked the midriff or initiated an attack, including analysis of the directions of the op­ponent’s punches and their habits. The data provided by the NSTC team enabled coaches to make better use of training and strategy sessions.

After returning from Tokyo and taking a short break, Huang went right back into training to prepare for the 2022 Asian Games. At the same time, her longer-­term goal is to compete at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

“You did it, you are doing fine.” This is something that Liu Tsung-tai said to Huang Hsiao-wen, and it is the feeling we all have in supporting her.