POCKET pitbull Felix Diaz claimed the Dominican Republic's first ever Olympic boxing gold at the Beijing Games yesterday.

Diaz was at times wild but he never let up his frenetic attacking as he easily outpointed Manus Boonjumnong of Thailand 12-4 in the featherweight final.

Manus was the reigning champion but he struggled to contain the Dominican, who stands only 5ft 5in tall.

The pair were level at 2-2 after the first round but Diaz dominated the third, scoring eight points to just one as he swarmed all over Manus and never stopped throwing haymakers that one way or another found their target.

"We spent all day yesterday watching videos of Boonjomnong because we knew that there has to be an effective strategy to fight him, nobody else could find the right stratgey but I guess we did," said Diaz.


"This is so important for me but also for my country. I don't have a coach, I have a magician."



Manus, a reformed playboy, may have lost but there was better news for his teammate 33-year-old veteran Somjit Jongjohor, who beat Andris Laffita of Cuba 8-2 to win flyweight gold.

The 2003 world champion held up a picture of his country's king Bhumibol Adulyadej after the victory.

"All my life I've been waiting for today. I went through so much, hurt so much," said Somjit.

Laffita admitted Somjit had been too fast for him, particularly in the first two rounds during which the Thai opened up a 6-0 lead.

The most contentious fight of the evening was the middleweight final between James DeGale and Cuba's Emilio Correa, which the Briton won 16-14.

But he was roundly jeered after the bout by a pro-Cuba crowd -- seemingly mostly Russians -- who felt that Correa had been hard done by.

The Cuban, who was trying to emulate his father, who won gold at welterweight in 1972 in Munich, was penalised two points in the first round for biting -- a charge he denied -- and found himself 10-4 down at the halfway mark.

He closed things up to 12-10 at the end of the third after Degale was penalised for holding but the Briton's counter-punching impressed the judges more than Correa's aggression and punch output -- although there was no doubt who the crowd thought should have won.

There were even murmured jeers at the beginning of the British national anthem.

"That's disrespect. I don't know where they're going with that," DeGale said of the booing.



In the heavyweight division Rakhim Chakhkiev of Russia gained revenge on Italy's world champion Clemente Russo.

Chakhkiev was beaten by Russo in the final of the World Championships last year but he scored two unanswered points in the final round to eek out a 4-2 victory.

The most one-sided bout of the night was at light-welterweight where Ukraine's Vasyl Lomachenko stopped France's Khedafi Djelkhir in the first round.

Djelkhir was totally out-gunned from the start and took three standing counts before the referee waved off the contest. -- AFP