Punch to gut of team

BEIJING - The United States sent nine boxers to the Olympics. After four days of competition, five remain. There are a few medal contenders within that group, but the team is reeling after Rau'shee Warren, the reigning flyweight world champion and the team's best hope of winning gold, lost his opening bout, 9-8, to Lee Ok-sung of South Korea.

Warren was inconsolable afterward, falling into the arms of a USA Boxing publicist. Between sobs, he said, "I lost, I want to go home," and twice paused an interview to wipe tears from his eyes. Warren, 21, the only returning boxer from the 2004 Olympics, passed up a potentially lucrative professional career after his first-round light flyweight loss in Athens in an effort to fulfill his promise to his mother, Paulette, of placing a gold medal around her neck. His future, like his team's, is now in flux.

Once a boxing superpower, the US has had a turbulent few months, with Warren's loss ranking as perhaps the most disappointing moment of its time here.

Warren, who fell behind by a point with about 55 seconds left, presumed he was winning until the final 15 seconds, when he realized he needed to stop dancing around the edge of the ring and start punching.

The coach, Dan Campbell, went so far last night to say that the bizarre circumstances surrounding the outcome of Warren's match, which he said was scored unfairly, threatens to dent the confidence of the remaining boxers.

"I think they're most definitely going to be psyched out," Campbell said. "We have a psychologist around, and we're going to make sure she'll talk to the team. I'm sure all of them are going to be psyched out by this."

As of this morning, three boxers - Shawn Estrada, Demetrius Andrade of Providence, and Raynell Williams - had won their first matches, while two others, the heavyweight Deontay Wilder and the light flyweight Luis Yanez, were scheduled to box in separate sessions. Like Warren, Andrade won a world championship last November, and Williams and Wilder are considered to have promising draws.

Even so, the US appears on its way to more Olympic boxing frustrations. Despite winning 108 medals in the sport overall in Olympic competition, 20 more than second-place Russia, the team has won only six in the last two Games and only two golds since 1996 in Atlanta. Their count has declined by two - from six to four to two - every year since then.

"From the beginning, we've felt that if we could come away with two, three, four medals, that we'd feel very good about it, and that hasn't changed," said Jim Millman, the chief executive of USA Boxing. "But there's no question that this has been a discouraging couple of days."

It started Friday morning when the bantamweight Gary Russell Jr., also a medal favorite, collapsed in a desperate final effort to make weight and was disqualified. It continued Sunday and Monday, when Javier Molina and Sadam Ali were defeated handily in their Olympic debuts. (New York Times)