Anthony Joshua‘s doctor wants the heavyweight to use a revolutionary new mouthguard that could help boxing’s fight against fatal head injuries.
Professor Mike Loosemore, who is also GB Boxing’s chief medical officer, is spearheading development of the technology and hopes it could be introduced into Joshua’s camp after his upcoming rematch with Andy Ruiz Jnr.
Boxing has been rocked by four deaths in recent months. American Patrick Day passed away last week after suffering a brain injury, and Russian Maxim Dadashev, Argentina’s Hugo Santillan and Bulgaria’s Boris Stanchov have also all died since July from injuries sustained in the ring.
The latest tragedy came just weeks after Joshua’s trainer Rob McCracken claimed he knew the heavyweight was concussed in his defeat by Ruiz in June.
And Loosemore is advocating new technology which uses a chip inserted into a mouthguard to provide live analysis of blows to the head, sending the data to a nearby computer.
‘From a personal point of view, I’d like to get Anthony involved in using this,’ Loosemore said of the technology developed by Swansea-based company Sports & Wellbeing Analytics. ‘The product is what we’ve been looking for, really. We’ve been looking for something where we can measure the real impact on the head.
‘I could see it being used in boxers’ sparring. If they take some heavy shots, you could call the sparring off for the day or you could rest them up for a couple of days or a week, or until they’ve made a recovery. It would give us a better idea of the concussive blows the boxer was taking during sparring because at the moment we have really no idea.
Loosemore’s ambitions to introduce the technology have received the backing of the British Boxing Board of Control.
‘Anything that looks after boxers is good so we would be supportive of anything like that,’ BBBoC general secretary Robert Smith told Sportsmail. ‘Mike is a good man, I know him really, really well. We will be very supportive of anything he’s doing, absolutely.’
The technology is ready to use and the hope is that one day the mouthguards would be tailored to individual fighters and their own concussion threshol
