再掲「井岡一翔選手」英文2013/12/31＠大阪府立体育館

英文エッセイ書いてみた2

Boxing

It was a good fight that Kazuto Ioka, the champion of the light flyweight division,
fought against Felix Alberard putting his championship on the line
on the 31st of December, 2013 in Tokyo.

Before the match, the newspapers told us that the challenger, ranked first by the World Boxing Council, was the strongest challenger because he had won eighteen straight matches
and had lost none in his career including sixteen by KO with his strong punches.
On the other hand, Ioka had won 13 matches and lost none including nine by KO.
Everyone thought the match should be a good fight. 

The fight was one of the most exciting boxing matches I had ever seen.
Neither boxer yielded an inch. Both of them fought hard against the other,
each boxer punching until the end of the match. Neither of them was knocked down.
They were standing and moving around inside the ring with all of their strength.
That reminded me of the long ago fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Leonard won this match but almost all boxing fans remember this bout as the one of most exciting bouts in history. 

As in the historical match, Ioka won the match in the end.
His defensive technique was so perfect that Alberard could not hit Ioka’ s face and body directly. Alberard’s punches kept hitting the empty air. Ioka swayed, ducked, ran away from his enemy’s punches, sometimes barely, and guarded his face and body with his hands and gloves.
However, Ioka always landed his punches efficiently on Alberard’s face and body.
When the match was over, Ioka’s face was clean and looked cool,
Alberad’s face was disfigured like a frog’s face.

Boxing matches excite us as sports. I was excited by this match.
At the same time it taught us that you can’t get the championship with only offense.
Defensive techniques are not flashy, so many people easily forget how important they are.
If a boxer wanted to master these techniques he should learn them
and spend a lot of time on practicing them.
This boxing match taught those who watched it how important it is to work hard on things that are not flashy.