The high point of Vasile Tiţă’s career was at his first major international tournament, the 1952 Olympic Games, where he reached the middleweight final, where he was knocked out by Floyd Patterson after a minute of boxing. Called Prince of Obor (Prinţul din Obor) during his boxing career – Obor, where he was from, being a neighborhood of Bucarest, Tiţă competed at three more major international tournaments after his Olympic success, but with less success. At the 1953 and 1957 European Championships, he lost in the first round and at the 1955 European Championships, he reached the quarter-finals, where he lost to eventual bronze medalist Bedřich Koutný. Domestically, Tiţă won seven consecutive Romanian titles from 1951-57, six of them as a light-middleweight and one, in 1954, as a middleweight. Tiţă died in June 2013 after suffering from Alzheimer’s decease for a decade, as the last survivor of four Romanian athletes who medaled at the 1952 Olympics.
Romania