📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Saturday 12 September
Nineteen years old, in Moscow, in front of a Soviet crowd, and he stopped the Soviet in the second round. Bulgaria has had plenty of Olympic champions, but the Bulgarian entry calls this one the youngest of the lot, and he was born on this date in 1960. There is a Belfast man in the story too, which I will come to.
What happened on this day
Petar Yosifov Lesov was born on 12 September 1960 in the village of Sekirovo, now a quarter of the town of Rakovski, and started boxing at fourteen at the Lokomotiv school attached to the Hristo Botev primary school in his own village. His first coach was Lyuben Gadzhev; from there he went to Lokomotiv Plovdiv and trained under Petar Stoychev. He won the national title in every age group he passed through, and at his first senior outing, the Strandzha tournament of 1978, he won his category outright. In 1979 he became world junior champion in Yokohama. Rakovski made him an honorary citizen that December, which was still months before the thing he is actually remembered for.
Moscow 1980, flyweight, up to 51 kg. He beat Onofre Ramírez of Nicaragua and Hassen Sherif of Ethiopia five votes to nil, Gilberto Roman of Mexico four to one, and in the semi-final Hugh Russell of Ireland, again five to nil. In the final he stopped Viktor Miroshnichenko of the Soviet Union by technical knockout in the second round. Two European titles followed, Tampere in 1981 and Varna in 1983, and more Strandzha cups, and then illness ended his competitive career at 24. A professional comeback in 1991 was a disaster: five defeats, all by knockout or stoppage, and he was finished inside a year with a record of nought and five. Nicaragua, of all places, put his face on a postage stamp. He has coached since 1985, at CSKA and alongside the national team, took over as national head coach from 2007 to 2011, and guided Detelin Dalakliev to the world title in Milan in 2009. On his sixtieth birthday, in 2020, they unveiled a three-metre statue of him by the sculptor Zhivko Zhelev on Europa Square in the village where he started.
Why this matters for British expats
Moscow 1980 is the one every British sports fan of a certain age remembers for the wrong reasons. The government of the day, in partial support of the American-led boycott, left it to athletes to decide for themselves; Britain skipped the opening ceremony entirely, represented by one man, the British Olympic Association's Dick Palmer, carrying the Olympic flag; and when British golds came, the Olympic flag went up in place of the Union Flag and the Olympic anthem was played instead of God Save the Queen. Somewhere inside that strange fortnight, a flyweight from the New Lodge in Belfast lost nought to five to the young man whose birthday it is today, took bronze, went home and spent years photographing his own city for the Irish News. Bulgarians talk about their Olympic boxers the way we talk about our Olympic rowers, with the same long memories and the same arguments, and Lesov is one of the half-dozen names that will come up. There is no Shumen angle today, so the city will have to wait its turn.
Sources and further reading
The village school, the coaches, the illness that ended it and the statue come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Petar Lesov, with the round-by-round Olympic record and the professional comeback from the English one. The British side of Moscow 1980 and the Belfast boxer's later life are drawn from Wikipedia's pages on Great Britain at those Games and on Hugh Russell.