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Well let me ask the specific possibility, if the 70-year-old eschews striking and just attempts to grab the opponent, what are the chances they are able to lock down the fight and just throw the female to the ground and hit her there? No elegant takedown, just grabbing on and throwing her down.
I'd speculate that a 175 pound geezer could sit on Amy Broudhurst's chest and obviate most of her cardio advantage right there.
Zero. If he eschews striking in favor of lunging, she'd just run away, while peppering him with jabs for his trouble. He's not going to catch her. She's faster, especially within the context of moving while keeping cover on an opponent. If he just sprints at her, she's going to change direction faster than he can, while hitting him in the face, which may not immediately knock him out but he's not going to like it.
I'll cede that a man, even a relatively old man, who is in reasonably robust condition could probably win a hockey fight where they grab each other's sweaters and wail on each other with no room to escape, strategize, or dodge. But now we're sort of building a series of increasingly absurd hypotheticals that don't tell us much about olympic boxing at all at all.
Ilona Maher is actually a pretty dead on ringer for me in height and weight, while I have the advantage of being male and she has the advantage of being an elite athlete. She posted workouts that I think I could do trivially, but not without effort, like hitting a 235# front squat for three reps and multiple sets. ((My wife joked that I should have married her, we could share clothes and spot each other on squats.)) Do you think that every random untrained man can hit a 235# front squat for a clean triple? Idk. Probably within six months to a year of training I would expect a reasonably fit man to hit two plates, but I have friends who work out for whom it would be non-trivial. Certainly if we had a motte-up I would expect to see a few mottizens drop the bar onto the safeties if we made everyone do 235x3 below parallel.
I don't think the strength difference is big enough to make the difference, unless we start playing with absurd hypos: he's a 70 year old but he's a track athlete, and we shoved a neuralink up his ass so we're playing him with an xbox controller and he isn't going to feel fear or pain he's just going to go for it no matter what, and he's 70 and has spent his whole life training but has no nagging injuries or health issues, no bum knees or blood thinners that mean he bleeds like a stuck pig, he's never fought in the ring before and is totally untrained but he's got a perfect head for strategy and ideal sangfroid, etc.
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