Greek-American Boxer Faces a New Fight After Olympic Dream Dies

Ekdikisi. The word means revenge in Greek, and ever since Nickolaus Kangelaris, a baby-faced amateur boxer and martial artist from Hell’s Kitchen, came home from the Athens Olympics, ekdikisi has been his mission.Not because a judge cheated him out of a medal. Not for getting knocked out by a lucky punch. Kangelaris’s personal tragedy never got that far: The super-heavyweight who goes by the name “El Greco” never even got a chance to compete.Kangelaris claims that after he declined to pay Greece’s top boxing officials a percentage of his winnings and future endorsement deals, they conspired to keep him off the team after initially promising him a slot. Now Kangelaris, a 25-year-old dual citizen, has filed a lawsuit in Greece’s civil and criminal courts against the Hellenic Boxing Federation, citing administrative negligence, corruption, and fraud.“A lot of people thought the reason why they didn’t want me on the team was because I was American, but in hindsight the reason was that I wouldn’t pay anyone off,” Kangelaris told The New York Sun in his first public remarks since returning from Greece.(Efforts to reach the Hellenic Boxing Federation were unsuccessful and e-mail messages to a spokesperson were not returned.)Kangelaris had also tried to make Olympic history by medaling in two combat sports – he wanted to compete in taekwando – but he said that Greek officials declined to offer him a “fight-off” to qualify.While it’s hard to pin price tags on shattered dreams, the fighter is asking for compensation of $140,000 for nine months worth of training and travel expenses. That number may seem high, Kangelaris said, but it all adds up when you consider the costs of living in an Athens hotel before the Olympics, paying for his coach, plane and event tickets for 11 members of his family, hiring a lawyer, international phone calls, etc.The fighter is also asking for $36.5 million in punitive damages – money he estimates he could have won in endorsement deals and state-sponsored gifts. Like many countries, Greece lavishes its medal winners with payments, homes, and pensions.Should he win any of that claim in a Greek court room, Kangelaris, a graduate of George Washington University, vowed to use those funds to build an international nonprofit that would advocate for amateur athletes.“No athlete should ever have to go through what I went through again,” Kangelaris said.The fighter’s storyline once seemed idyllic. He spent several months training alongside other Greek-American athletes at the Olympic training center in Lake Placid. He gave speeches to local Greek civic groups in Astoria, Queens, and marched down Fifth Avenue alongside other Olympic hopefuls in the Greek Independence Day parade. He arrived at the Olympic Village early last month ready to check himself in as Greece’s only super-heavyweight.“No question in mind, having been with him in the meetings [with Greek boxing officials] that this kid was on the team,” said the fighter’s veteran amateur coach, Lawrence “Tokey” Hill, the United States Olympic Committee’s Coach of the Year for 1999.But when the pair arrived in Athens, everything began to change. Greek officials allegedly began demanding money from the fighter. Kangelaris said he was approached by the Hellenic Boxing Federation’s vice president, Jack Antzel, who represents Greece in the Amateur International Boxing Association, a world sanctioning body with a reputation for employing corrupt administrators, referees, and judges. Antzel is also married to Gilda Antzel, chair of the European Amateur Boxing Association.According to Kangelaris, in exchange for securing his place on the Greek team, Antzel asked the fighter to pay for a trip to Las Vegas, ringside seats at this weekend’s Oscar De La Hoya-Bernard Hopkins middleweight championship, along with $10,000 for “expenses.” (Efforts to reach the Antzels at their home in Greece were unsuccessful.)Kangelaris also said he was approached by the president of the Hellenic Boxing Federation, George Makrinos, who demanded a percentage of Kangelaris’s endorsement deals should he make it to the Olympic Sweet Sixteen, a guarantee considering the super heavyweight field had only 16 competitors.After Kangelaris refused to dole out those bribes, he said, he began to notice shifts in attitude. Soon his phone calls to the federation were not returned. Next, his name was missing from the team roster. Then, the fighter found himself on a plane back to New York before the first bell rang.“They made a fool of [Kangelaris], they played games with him, it was very bad, very dirty,” one federation employee said in a telephone interview from Athens. “He was a very good fighter and he had a chance at winning a medal and they knew that if he won, they could not control his money.”Legislators in Greece have shown interest in Kangelaris’s claims, vowing to investigate the federation and “cleanse the dirty field of sports.”“What happened to [Kangelaris] was at least unfair and unfair to Greece,” Stavros Dalakis, a member of the Greek Parliament, wrote in a letter to The Sun, adding that Kangelaris was “qualified as an athlete to represent Greece.”Allegations of corruption inside Greece’s boxing federation had been exposed in a Greek television program months before the Olympics began. But the stories of Greece’s most accomplished boxers getting scratched from fighting in their own Olympics were never reported in America.“While most of the international media was worried about security and construction of the Olympic stadiums,” Kangelaris said, “the flagrant scandals and abuses of power towards athletes in Greece were tremendously overlooked.”Falsified medical reports and doctored ranking sheets were publicly cited by a number of amateur fighters, who claimed officials had improperly stacked Greece’s team with unfit competitors.According to the federation employee, many had personal connections to officials. For example, Georgios Gazis, a middleweight who lost his first Olympic match, is the son of one of the group’s board of directors.While Kangelaris was initially promised one of the guaranteed tournament slots alloted to the host nation, boxing officials opted instead to request a wild card for him, so a local fighter could compete.The federation’s request for Kangelaris, however, was filed eight days after the deadline, records show, and the bid was denied. The paperwork trail prompts questions. If Greek boxing officials had conspired to keep Kangelaris off the team, then why file any paperwork at all?Kangelaris doesn’t yet know. He suspects that, in response to political pressure, federation officials could always shrug off a late submission as an administrative error.One factor, however, is clear. If the request had been filed properly, the fighter would have been granted an Olympic berth because the super heavyweight field was virtually empty.Still, Kangelaris is not ready to hang up the gloves. Despite holding a cushy job working for his father’s real estate development company, the fighter said he plans to turn pro. He longs to prove that his mission for revenge is not in vain.“I got a lot of fighting to do,” he said.

Greek-American Boxer Faces a New Fight After Olympic Dream Dies

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