London, England: Kazakhstan started the Olympics in style with gold in the men’s cycling road race on the opening day and ended with a bang in men’s boxing on Sunday when Serik Sapiyev won his country’s seventh gold of the Games. Not only did the Guangzhou Asian Games welterweight champion win the Olympic 69kg title, he was also awarded the Val Barker Trophy for the best male boxer at the Games.

Sapiyev was a comfortable 17-9 winner over Freddie Evans of Great Britain and became the third Kazakh boxer to win this award after Vassiliy Jirov (1996) and Bakhtiyar Artayev (2004). Other previous recipients have been Vasyl Lomachenko (Ukraine), Roy Jones (USA) and Teofilo Stevenson (Cuba). “This victory is for the whole of Kazkakhstan,” he said. “I have been waiting for this moment for so long.

In Beijing I lost in the quarterfinals and I was upset but I was dreaming about the next Olympics.”
Han Soon Chul (Korea) won silver in the lightweight (60kg) division. In wrestling, Japan’s Tatsuhiro Yonemitsu won his country’s seventh gold of the Games by beating India’s Sushil Kumar in the men’s freestyle 66kg.
 
India finished with a 0-2-4 (6) record. In the same event, Kazakhstan took a bronze through Akzhurek Tanatarov. Mongolia finished on 0-2-3 (5) with a silver for Tugstsogt Nyambayar in the men’s boxing flyweight (52kg) on Sunday. Eight-five of the 204 NOCs won medals, as USA finished on top (46-29-29-104) ahead of China (38-27-22-87) and Great Britain (29-17-19-65).