With a chance at gold, Torrez eyes first US men’s Olympic boxing title since 2004

The Californian will face Uzbekistan’s Bakhodir Jalolov on Sunday in the gold-medal bout, following in the footsteps of the likes of Muhammad Ali

“Eye of the Tiger” would have been a more obvious choice, but Richard Torrez Jr defies many of boxing’s cliches.

He strode towards the ring for his super heavyweight semi-final to the strains of the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” It seemed a rather gentle and ruminative choice of walk-up motivational music for an Olympic athlete, especially one planning on spending the next few minutes pummeling a 6ft 3in human chainsaw from Kazakhstan.

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