Daniyar Yeleussinov may be scarred for life after winning Olympic welterweight boxing gold on Wednesday, but if so he welcomed it on a historic day for Kazakhstan.
With blood seeping from a nasty gash between his eyes, the wound patched up with a surgical strip, the 25-year-old expected it to serve as a permanent reminder of what he had achieved. "Probably yes. The scar will remind me. Because I was boxing with this cut, I feel double happy about it," he said after beating Uzbekistan's Shakhram Giyasov on a unanimous points decision.
Morocco's Mohammed Rabii and France's Souleymane Diop Cissokho, who lost to Yeleussinov on Monday in a fight that was stopped by a clash of heads that cut the Kazakh, won bronze medals as losing semifinalists.
The victory extended Kazakhstan's dominance of the division to four Games in a row.
It was only the second time that a country has won the same division for four Olympics in succession and the first such streak involving four different boxers.
Serik Sapiyev punched his way to victory at London 2012, Bakhyt Sarsekbayev in Beijing in 2008 and Bakhtiyar Artayev in Athens in 2004.
Cuba won the heavyweight class in four successive Olympics between 1992 and 2004 but the great Felix Savon won the first three of those titles before Odlanier Solis took the fourth.
Yeleussinov, whose middleweight brother Dauren fights as a professional in the United States, said welterweight should now be called the Kazakh weight.
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