I felt almost physically sick when I heard the news that Venezuelan boxer Edwin Valero had been found dead in his police cell, a day after his arrest for murdering his wife. In these days of tabloid hyberbole when the word 'tragedy' is applied to the most mundane of mishaps, this is a tragedy in the true sense of the word.
Valero - a boxer I have regularly championed on this blog - was a fighter blessed with supreme natural talents and cursed by poverty, drug addiction and a violent, abusive temperament which spilled out of the ring with truly devastating consequences. He won all of his 27 professional fights inside the distance and was just starting to gain wider recognition. In Venezuela of course, he was a national hero, a symbol of defiance and closely linked to President Hugo Chavez, an image of whom he had tattooed across his chest.
Plenty of people will point the finger; at the authorities who denied him a license to fight in the US, at the people who surrounded and glorified him while turning a blind eye to his appalling behaviour, and at the sport of boxing itself. Valero is the third high-profile boxer to take his own life in recent times, following the suicides of Alex Arguello and Arturo Gatti. But at the end of the day no one is to blame but Edwin Valero himself, who has murdered his own wife, orphaned his children and thrown away the gifts God gave him. It will be interesting to see what happens now. His millions of fans in Venezuela will want to give him, and will probably get, a hero's farewell at his funeral, but the man was a murderer. In the end, suicide, as Bob Arum notes, was the only option open to him once he had sobered up and realised the enormity of what he had done. What an unspeakable tragedy for everyone concerned.
