Legendary Filipino and multi-weight world champion Manny Pacquiao had planned to fight at the Paris Olympics but has now suffered a major setback to his goal.
Pacquiao retired in 2021 after a final fight against Yordenis Ugas saw him lose across 12 rounds in Las Vegas. That came almost two years after a great win over Keith Thurman and after a long and storied career that saw him win world titles in eight different divisions.
However, the Pacman wanted to go on and fight at age 45 in the Olympic Games in Paris, where boxing bouts will be held in the Roland Garros tennis complex.
The age limit has already been changed once back in 2013 when it moved up from 34 and it had been mentioned that the Philippines Olympic body had talked of trying to trying to gain access via “universality.”
That is a system of free qualification to events that are given to small countries with few athletes who have a hard time qualifying on merit but it was determined that the Philippines had historically already been too successful to qualify from that scheme.
“Universality places are not allocated to [teams] with an average of more than eight athletes in individual sports/disciplines at the last two editions of the Olympic Games. This is the case for the Philippine Olympic Committee.”