Shittu's Commonwealth Games loss sparks debate on AI boxing judges

Dimeji Shittu walked out of the Commonwealth Games boxing final on Saturday with a silver medal and a story that would not let go. The 24-year-old English fighter had won the opening round decisively—all five judges agreed on that much. He had landed the cleaner shots, forced his Indian opponent Ankush Panghal to take a standing count. Everything pointed toward gold. Then the second round arrived, and the contest tilted.

Three judges gave that round to Panghal despite Shittu appearing to land the majority of the punches. The swing was narrow but decisive. Then came the first penalty: Shittu was docked a point for dipping his head low, a foul in amateur boxing. The infraction was real, but the timing felt harsh to those watching. When he was penalized again in the third round for the same offense—this time while actually hurting Panghal—the momentum had shifted entirely. By the final round, Shittu was chasing a decision that seemed to be slipping away.

What made the loss sting was not just the penalties. Four of the five judges scored the final round for Panghal, meaning the point deductions did not even determine the outcome. Shittu would have lost anyway. The former champion Richie Woodhall, watching from the commentary booth for TNT Sports, could barely contain his frustration. "The referee has cost Shittu the contest," he said. "He has been robbed." Woodhall called the judging "shocking" and "terrible." Commentator Dave Farrar echoed the sentiment, describing the final round scoring as "absolutely dreadful." The consensus among those who knew boxing was clear: something had gone wrong.

Shittu himself, to his credit, refused to dwell on it. Visibly distraught as the result was announced, he told BBC Sport that he could only blame himself. "Those are the rules," he said. "We live and we learn." He acknowledged the controversy but would not let it become his excuse. "If I'm sitting here blaming judges, blaming refs, I'm not going to get better," he said. It was the response of a fighter thinking about his next fight, not his last one.

But the loss had opened a door to a larger conversation. Delicious Orie, England's superheavyweight champion from the 2022 Commonwealth Games, watched the same bout and reached a different conclusion. "The referee has stripped the medal from Dimeji," he told TNT Sports. And then he posed a question that has been circulating through boxing for years: What if artificial intelligence could judge the sport instead?

The idea is not new. World Boxing, the international governing body that oversees amateur boxing at the Olympics and Commonwealth Games, has been investigating AI implementation under its president, Gennadiy Golovkin, a former unified world champion. The technology was already tested behind the scenes during Tyson Fury's 2024 bout with Oleksandr Usyk. Nothing is imminent, but the organization wants to understand whether AI could improve transparency and integrity in a sport where subjectivity has always been the final arbiter.

Orie was open to the possibility. "If I knew there was a specific set of scoring then yeah, bring AI," he said. "I would follow that rule book rather than someone's opinion." The appeal is obvious: objectivity replacing judgment, a computer measuring what a human eye might miss or misinterpret. But the challenge is equally obvious. Can artificial intelligence measure the power of a punch? Are all punches equal? In other sports, technology has worked well for factual questions—was the ball in or out, did the player commit a foul? Boxing asks something different. It asks for evaluation, not just observation. Whether AI can bridge that gap remains an open question, one that Shittu's silver medal has made impossible to ignore.