The best amateur lightweight in the world sat at home this week while blokes in blazers and tracksuits struck fighting poses in his absence and threatened once again to engulf their sport in civil war.
The fall-out from Sheffield-trained Frankie Gavin's failure to make the Olympic weight is bound to prove painful and probably costly for some of those deemed to have been directly involved in the episode.
Already, both UK Sport and the Amateur Box
ing Association have announced their own investigations into the incident, and there has been much furore over the estimated £60,000 of lottery funding 'squandered' in getting Birmingham boy Gavin ready for the Games.
There are those who pin the blame squarely on head coach Terry Edwards for failing to recognise Gavin's potential weight problem earlier, and doing something about it when the Beijing Games were still a distant prospect.
Others have noted Gavin's general lack of self-confidence for one so talented, and wondered whether the whispering of some promoters helped convince him to eschew the Olympics for the promise of turning professional on a high.
Both arguments are flawed. Edwards was hardly likely to have moved Gavin up in the wake of his Commonwealth Games triumph in Melbourne two years ago, when a weight problem simply did not exist.
And the thought that Gavin might have turned his back on more than four years of hard work on the eve of the biggest amateur boxing tournament in the world for the sake of an uncertain professional future is ridiculous.
The real truth of what happened in Macau will probably never come out. There are dark mutterings in too many bars and boardrooms. What is certain is the two men who do not deserve to be blamed are Frankie Gavin and Terry Edwards.
To suggest Gavin has squandered a penny of the UK Sport and lottery funding that has headed his way is patently absurd, unless Commonwealth and World Championship golds count for nothing in this targets-obsessed age.
What do you think? Post your comments below.Gavin has served his sport with aplomb, inspiring his younger team-mates and doing more than anybody else to help transform the image of domestic sport from occasional also-rans into a nation to be genuinely feared.
Edwards, meanwhile, has fought his legion of doubters with little support yet shaped a squad bristling with youth, talent, confidence and, above all, an extraordinary team spirit which has ensured unprecedented success.
Sure, there may be some pertinent questions to be asked about the shaping of more individual long-term training programmes, but Edwards can hardly be said to have fluked eight qualifiers for the Olympic Games.
Ask any of those fighters, including Gavin, about Edwards and they will describe a father figure who has brooked no nonsense in cajoling them through the gloomy pre-Melbourne days all the way to Beijing.
They are truly a team to be proud of, and that should not change for the sake of a couple of errant pounds. Otherwise the sport will lurch back into the bad old days of the blazer and tracksuit brigades, and will find itself with far weightier issues to solve.
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