Britain rolls on in Olympic boxing with Evans' win

LONDON (AP) — Welterweight Freddie Evans added another impressive win to Britain's growing collection at Olympic boxing Friday, beating fourth-seeded Egidijus Kavaliauskas of Lithuania 11-7.

Evans' third-round rally improved the British team to 8-1 at its home Olympics with six fighters still in medal contention. Furious Freddie, as the effusive 21-year-old Welshman is known, rode the support of another frenzied crowd to earn a quarterfinal bout for a medal with Custio Clayton of Canada.

"I've never experienced anything like it before," Evans said of the London crowd's support. "It really gives you a bit of a boost. ... They're all top lads here, but I'm confident that I can come back again and keep doing it."

Top-seeded flyweight Misha Aloyan of Russia won his opening Olympic bout at ExCel, while Mongolia's Tugstsogt Myambayar upset fourth-seeded Vincenzo Picardi of Italy 17-16. Top-seeded welterweight Taras Shelestyuk and France's Alexis Vastine also advanced.

Clayton beat Australia's Cameron Hammond 14-11 for his second win in London for the two-man Canadian team, which already has three victories in London after getting shut out in Beijing. That's just one fewer victory than the nine-man American team heading into the evening session.

Clayton came on in the third round against Hammond, whose curiously passive strategy forced the referee to warn him twice about not throwing punches. The father of two from Nova Scotia also fought cautiously at first, mindful of Hammond's superior reach, but was more aggressive and accurate throughout.

"I saw he wasn't going to pick it up, so I figured I had to do it," Clayton said. "I just had to move my head more, be more aggressive. ... I couldn't ask for anything better. The first couple of rounds were slow, but I picked it up. It feels great to be here."

Clayton will fight Evans on Tuesday with a chance to secure Canada's first Olympic boxing medal since 1996.

Myambayar and Picardi put on three entertaining rounds, with Myambayar gaining energy from a vocal section of Mongolian fans. Picardi crumpled to his knees and banged his head on the canvas in frustration when the verdict was announced.

Aloyan wasn't seriously tested by Algeria's Brahimi Samir in a 14-9 victory, but his quarterfinal bout will be against promising Puerto Rican teenager Jeyvier Cintron, who knocked off Brazil's Juliao Henriques 18-13.

In last year's world championships, Aloyan beat American Olympian Rau'shee Warren in the semifinals and edged Britain's Andrew Selby in the finals. Warren and Selby, the top two Olympic seeds behind Aloyan, are both scheduled to fight in the evening session.

The boxing tournament got back to normal Friday morning after Thursday's expulsion of a referee from Turkmenistan and a technical official from Azerbaijan for misbehavior. The moves raised reminders of the endemic corruption that the current AIBA administration says it's fighting to eliminate from a long-crooked sport.

AIBA has made swift decisions in several disciplinary cases at the Olympics, overturning the bout result affected by the Turkmen referee and sanctioning another German referee for an overzealous disqualification of an Iranian heavyweight.

AIBA also took the unusual step of releasing every judge's scores from British middleweight Anthony Ogogo's narrow victory over Ukrainian world champion Ievgen Khytrov on Thursday to show that an apparent scoring discrepancy appearing in the official results online was misleading.

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