i dont fully understand the concept of weigh ins. i get that as a fighter you have to weigh in at an agreed weight limit. but if the weigh in is the night before how do fighters like clottey, marg and others like that gain 15-20 lbs for fight night? also why are they allowed to?
The whole point in a weight classes is to have fighters in the division competing at similar weights and similar size with each other. That said, the lighter you can get yourself on the scales- the better your advantage. Take someone like Paul Williams as an example- he's an absolute monster for 147. Average guys at the weight obviously weigh the same as him but he has a much bigger reach and height advantage than others at the weight because he weighs in so light for his size. This basically means that by weighing so little he can impose himself on guys that weigh the same but are much smaller. This is why moving up in weight class is so difficult- because you are then moving up to fight bigger guys with better advantages. Now, to make a weight fighters have to sometimes do desperate things- in the end to make Super Featherweight, Floyd Mayweather Jr has claimed he had to starve himself for days to drain the excess weight off of his body. Other fighters will go in a sauna and try and get as much water out of their body as they can to weigh in @ the weight limit. Ricky Hatton used to regularly replace meals with food suplements. Fighters are allowed to gain weight before the fight for safety reasons- it aint healthy for a guy to fight dehydrated. That's it in a nutshell- does that help, mate?
Fighters have also had doctors inject that with IVs after they weigh in. I don't like it, the 30-32 hr weigh in procedure can kind of defeat the purpose of weight divisions. Something is wrong when it's a WW title bout and Baldomir outweighs Mayweather 161 to 149, or Cotto outweights Corley for a JWW title bout 157 to 140. While Flip Homansky (who now prefers the same day weigh in) led the change for day-before weigh ins, I'm not even sure they decided to change it for safety reasons. They might've just done it for financial reasons (money lost on the Spinks-Muhammad aborted rematch) and used safety as their official reason. Maybe it was both. I don't blame the fighters who cut a lot of weight, provided they fairly make the weight. I just have a problem with the system itself.
I read an article, in Ring I believe it was, that talked all about how the fighters with the bigger $$$$ and backing have hotels rooms set up for them that is equipped like a triage unit, complete with doctors and IV"s etc... Just don't seem right at all, does it?
