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In the summer of 1996, a baby-faced 20-year-old from Sudbury named Phil Boudreault of found himself on national television.<\/p>\n
He seemed shy and nervous telling a CBC journalist about his upset victory in the boxing tournament at the Atlanta Olympics.<\/p>\n
“This morning I ate breakfast and I puked my guts out,” he said, before saying hello to his family back home, including his young daughter. <\/p>\n
“It’s a lot of pressure for a 20-year-old to handle, but I think I handled it well.”<\/p>\n
Boudreault became a fan favourite across Canada during the Olympics, but his moment in the sun was short-lived.<\/p>\n
He spent the next 30 years in the world of outlaw motorcycle gangs, including several convictions for violent assaults, before dying recently at the age of 50.<\/p>\n
“He made his own path,” said his former coach Gord Appoloni, from Sudbury’s Top Glove Boxing Academy. <\/p>\n
“Once he left the gym, he was out of my hands.”<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1769402535_222_default.jpg\")
Gord Apolloni has been coaching boxing since 1990. (Markus Schwabe\/CBC)<\/p>\n
Appoloni, who was also coach of Canada’s national boxing team between 1992 and 1997, said he coached Boudrault from a young age and wishes he had more fighters like him. <\/p>\n
“He was a role model right from day one. He brought everyone else up to his level,” Appoloni said. <\/p>\n
“He didn’t care about his opponent. He just wanted to beat him.”<\/p>\n
The welterweight represented Canada at the Pan-Am Games in 1995, reaching the quarterfinals and then prepared for the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta.<\/p>\n
Appoloni remembers a day in the gym when Boudreault and his sparing partner were avoiding hitting each other too hard and then revealed that they had brand-new tattoos on their abdomens.<\/p>\n
Boudreault’s read: “Crazy.”<\/p>\n
“The media just ate that up. It was all over the papers in Atlanta,” Appoloni remembered. <\/p>\n
“And I think he liked the attention.”<\/p>\n
In a close decision, Boudreault lost to Russia’s Eduard Zahkharov, leaving him just short of the Olympic podium<\/p>\n
“I thought I won it,” he told CBC at the time. <\/p>\n
“But he’s a good fighter and I wish him the best.”<\/p>\n
“Boxing was good to him,” Appoloni said.<\/p>\n
“Even though he felt he got a raw deal in his last fight at the Olympics, he came out of those games as a warrior. Everyone knew who Phil Boudreault was,”<\/p>\n
The coach hoped that would be the start of a long career for his young fighter, but Appoloni said Boudreault was already involved with the Hells Angels at that point.<\/p>\n
“He made up his mind prior to the Olympics. We had to have a conversation about limiting his involvement because that could have ruined his chances of going,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We never spoke about that at all.”<\/p>\n
Boudreault would rise in the ranks of the biker gangs, to be a leader in the Ottawa area. He was convicted of a violent assault in a Sudbury bar in 2004 and later convicted of uttering death threats to police officers during his trial for that assault. <\/p>\n