Straight from a defeat to Veaceslav Gojan of Moldova, Kumar rushed out to talk to reporters. Fresh from the heat of a bout, he did not know how the match was lost. But he struggled to prepare himself to accept that his Olympic dream was over, that he had in the end not crossed that thin line that separates victory and a jolly good effort.

So, he said, there are no regrets. Victory is victory, defeat is defeat, he said. I have treasured my wins, I know this is a defeat. But I tried.

Boxing bouts are over within 11 minutes of having begun. A drift in the direction of scoring, and one boxer could run away with the momentum. Once a pair of boxers have finished their match, it does not take long for the next pair to be ushered in. The spectators too move on. The winner clearly has little care to dwell too long on what happened before. The loser is left wondering what he could have done to change the tide.

Kumar lost his four-round bout 10:3. It began evenly enough, with the first two rounds evenly poised on the scoreboard, 1:1 in each. But the score belied the desperation that had already begun creeping into Akhil’s actions after the Moldovan maintained a cautious, defensive, shell-guard strategy, giving Akhil little purchase with his initial offence.

Some points, it will be argued, could have gone Akhil’s way in the beginning. They didn’t.

Coach Gurbax Singh Sandhu said the strategy was to go all out for the first 30 seconds. They went unscored. But once the Moldovan had withstood the initial flurry, said Sandhu, Akhil was demoralised and felt physical pressure. Also, he added, if a boxer feels he is not scoring for “correct” punches, it increases frustration.

Boxing, Sandhu repeated, is a different ballgame: “After beating the world number one (as Akhil did to get to the quarter-finals), you lose to a non-entity.” No competitor is, of course, a non-entity. But the coach emphasised that had punches been scored in the early minutes, everything could have changed. But: “We were not able to beat the computer and impress the judges.”

By then, the reality of the loss had sunk in and the coach said, Akhil is very upset, he is not able to talk.

But minutes before Akhil Kumar had made a promise: he would help Jitender Kumar and Vijender Kumar for their bouts on Wednesday.