Gurcharan batters opponent, enters quarters

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Sydney: India's Gurcharan Singh pummeled South African Danie Venter into submission with his unbridled aggression and stopped the latter inside the distance in their second round bout to storm into the light heavyweight quarter-finals of the Olympic games boxing here on Sunday.

The 23-year-old tall and rangy Punjab fighter, boxing with an unusual open-chested stance, used his height and reach advantage to good effect and forced the South African take four mandatory standing counts before the referee stopped the contest with 27 seconds left in the fourth and final round.

The Indian, by then, had taken an unassailable 26-14 lead over Venter, who was totally out boxed especially in the last two rounds of their bout which Gurcharan, who has 17 international medals to his credit of which 11 are gold, won with 10-3 and 5-3 margins.

Gurcharan, who had made it to Sydney in style by winning the gold medal in the Seoul qualifiers, has a very tough quarter-final opponent in Andrei Fedthchouk, a hard punching Ukrainian southpaw to subdue before becoming the first Indian to reach the boxing medal round in the games history.

It was an outstanding display by Gurcharan especially considering that he had undergone a shoulder surgery prior to the trip to Cuba, which was part of the four- member Indian team's tuning-up process for the Olympics.