KO vs TKO in Boxing: The Difference and Who Stops a Fight

A knockout, KO, is a boxer going down and failing to get up before the referee reaches ten. A technical knockout, TKO, is the fight being stopped without a completed count, because the referee has decided one boxer cannot safely go on. That is the whole difference. Both are defeats inside the distance, both are recorded by the British Boxing Board of Control as stoppages, and the loser is suspended either way.

The two Carl Froch and George Groves fights show each in turn. In Manchester in November 2013 the referee, Howard Foster, stepped between them in the ninth round with Groves on his feet: a technical knockout. At Wembley Stadium six months later a single right hand left Groves on his back in the eighth, and that one went into the books as a knockout. Between those two clear cases lies a wide band of endings that could be written down either way, which is where most of the confusion comes from.

The difference between a KO and a TKO, set side by side

The count is the dividing line. Once a boxer is down, the timekeeper begins counting the seconds and the referee takes the count up aloud over him. If he is on his feet and fit to box before ten, the fight goes on. If ten is reached first, he has been counted out. Nobody exercised any judgement about whether he should continue; the clock decided.

A technical knockout is the opposite kind of ending. Somebody did exercise a judgement, and usually it was the referee.

Point of comparison	Knockout	Technical knockout
What ends the fight	The count reaches ten	The referee stops it, or the corner retires its boxer
Is the loser down?	Yes, or unable to rise	Often still standing
Who decides	Nobody: the count runs out	The referee, sometimes on a doctor's advice
Can it be disputed?	Rarely	Frequently
Counted in a knockout ratio	Yes	Yes

Under the Board's rules a boxer is "down" in more situations than lying on the canvas. He is down if any part of his body other than his feet touches the floor, if he is hanging on the ropes unable to defend himself, or if he is in the act of rising. He has ten seconds to regain his feet unassisted. A boxer knocked clean out of the ring has twenty seconds to get back in, again without help. The detail of the count, including the mandatory eight that follows every knockdown, is in our guide to knockdown rules and the ten count.

A knockout does not require unconsciousness. A boxer who takes a knee, hears the count and chooses not to get up has been knocked out as surely as one who never saw the punch. When Gerald McClellan dropped to one knee in the tenth round against Nigel Benn at the London Arena in February 1995 and stayed there while the referee counted, the result was KO 10.

The grey area: a count abandoned part-way, or never started

Referees stopped completing counts over badly hurt boxers a long time ago, and for a good reason. Ten seconds is ten seconds in which a doctor is not in the ring. If a man goes down heavily and is plainly not getting up, a modern referee waves his arms at two or three, or does not start counting at all, pulls the gumshield out and calls for help.

That is good practice and it wrecks the tidy definition. If a knockout is failing to beat a count of ten, and no count of ten took place, the ending is technically a stoppage. If a knockout is a man being punched to the floor and not getting up, it is a knockout. Both readings are defensible, and both are in use.

The second Froch and Groves fight is the standard British illustration. Charlie Fitch, the American referee, looked at Groves once and waved it off without counting. The result is generally listed as a knockout in the eighth round. Under the stricter reading it would be a TKO, and the stricter reading is the one in the Board's own regulations: a referee may interrupt the count where he considers that a fallen boxer needs urgent medical attention, and in that case the opponent is declared the winner by technical knockout.

Why the same ending is logged two ways

There is no world rule on the point because there is no world rulebook. A result is recorded by the commission that supervised the fight, in whatever terms its own officials use, and is then entered by record-keepers who apply conventions of their own. Some American commissions write TKO for anything short of a full count. Others, and most record compilers, write KO where a boxer was knocked down and the fight ended there, whatever the referee's arms did.

The practical rule for a reader is this. If the losing boxer was on the floor when the fight ended and did not get up, expect to see KO, and do not be surprised by TKO. If he was on his feet, it will be TKO everywhere. The margin of doubt is confined to one situation, a man down and a count cut short, and in that situation the difference between the two labels tells you about the scorer's habits and nothing about the fight.

A second grey area is smaller. A boxer who beats the count, rising at eight or nine, but whom the referee then refuses to let continue has not been counted out. That is a technical knockout by any reading, even though to the crowd it looks like the end of a count.

What a referee is judging when he stops a fight with both boxers standing

The Board's rule gives three grounds. A referee shall stop a contest if he decides, in his complete discretion, that one boxer is outclassed, is unable to continue as a result of injury, or is not in a position to continue boxing. The American formula is that a boxer must be "intelligently defending himself". Both come to the same question, asked several times a minute: is this man still taking part in a boxing match, or is he only being hit?

A referee answers it from a handful of signs.

Unanswered punches. A boxer under fire who is punching back, even wildly, is in a fight. One who has taken five or six clean shots to the head without throwing anything is not, and a run of them is the most common trigger for a stoppage.

Whether he is defending himself. Covering up behind a high guard on the ropes is defence. Turning the back, dropping the hands, bending at the waist with the head exposed or looking away from the opponent is not. The defence of the Manchester stoppage rested on exactly this, that Groves had turned away and was no longer protecting himself.

His legs. Stiff knees, a stagger on changing direction, feet that cross or stick. Legs go before the rest of a boxer does, and referees watch them more than spectators do.

His eyes. After a knockdown the referee uses the mandatory count to look into the boxer's face. Eyes that do not track, or that stare past him, end fights that the boxer's body language suggested could continue.

His response to an instruction. "Walk towards me." "Put your hands up." "Show me something or I'm stopping it." A boxer who does not respond, or responds slowly, has answered the question.

1. 1KnockdownThe standing boxer is sent to a neutral corner and the referee picks up the count from the timekeeper.
2. 2Count to eightThe count continues to eight even if the boxer rises at once. The referee uses the seconds to watch him get up.
3. 3Eyes and balanceThe referee looks at the boxer's eyes and at whether he is steady on his feet without the ropes.
4. 4InstructionThe boxer is told to step forward or raise his gloves. A slow or absent response ends the fight.
5. 5DecisionThe referee either wipes the gloves and waves the fight on, or waves his arms and stops it: a technical knockout.

The usual sequence of a referee's assessment during and after the count. It describes practice, not a numbered rule, and a referee may stop the contest at any point in it.

What the referee is not judging

The scorecards. A referee in a title fight does not know them, and the fact that the boxer in trouble is winning on points is no reason to give him longer. Groves was ahead on all three cards when Foster stopped him. Nor is the importance of the occasion a factor, at least in principle, though critics of late stoppages in big fights have long suspected that it is one in practice.

The word "outclassed" in the British rule deserves a second look. It allows a referee to stop a contest in which no single dramatic moment has occurred: no knockdown, no cut, nobody hurt. A boxer who is losing every second of every round to an opponent several levels above him can be rescued on that ground alone, and on small-hall bills that is how many fights end.

The referee's authority under the unified rules and the Board's

The unified rules adopted by the Association of Boxing Commissions put it in one sentence: the referee is the sole arbiter of a bout and is the only individual authorised to stop a contest. Promoters, supervisors from the sanctioning bodies, judges and commission officials at ringside have no such power. They may think a fight should be stopped. They cannot stop it.

The Board of Control's rules say the same thing in British terms. The referee officiates inside the ring and acts as sole arbiter of the Rules of Boxing. The stoppage clause is drafted as a duty, not a permission: if he decides a boxer is outclassed, unable to continue through injury or in no position to go on boxing, he shall stop the contest. The words "in his complete discretion" matter as well, because they mean the decision is his opinion at the moment and is not open to being second-guessed on the merits.

What the British rules add is the corner. Responsibility for retiring a boxer lies with his manager or, if the manager is absent, the chief second, and with them alone. That gives a British fight two people who can end it on a boxer's behalf: the referee, for either boxer, and the man in charge of each corner, for his own.

How a stoppage is signalled

The referee steps between the boxers and waves both arms across each other above his head. In practice he usually takes hold of the beaten man at the same time, partly to shield him and partly because a boxer who has just been stopped is often unsteady. The bell is rung, the master of ceremonies announces that the referee has stopped the contest and gives the round and the time, and the winner's arm is raised.

How rarely a stoppage is changed

Almost never. A boxer who believes he was stopped too soon can complain to the body that licensed the fight, in Britain the Board, and a sanctioning body can order a rematch. What neither will normally do is alter the result, because the result records a discretionary judgement that the rules place with the referee. The Board's Rules of Boxing close the point by saying that his decision, on matters arising while the boxers are in the ring, shall in all cases be final. Results are changed for other reasons: a failed drug test, a punch landed after the bell, a foul wrongly ruled a legal blow. A referee's reading of a boxer's condition is not among them.

Manchester is again the example. Groves protested to the IBF, whose title was at stake, and it ordered a rematch. The record of the first fight still says Froch won by technical knockout in the ninth.

The ringside doctor: when an inspection is called and where the decision sits

Every Board of Control show must have at least two doctors present, and one of them, a doctor practised in managing an unconscious or partly conscious patient, has to be seated at ringside for the whole of every contest. They are there for emergencies first. Their second job is advising the referee.

The rule is short. A referee may consult the ringside doctor at any stage about the fitness of a boxer. A doctor may also go to a boxer's corner between rounds of his own accord, and if he is worried about what he finds he must signal to the referee before the next round begins. The usual occasion is a cut or a swelling. The referee calls time, walks the boxer to a corner, and the doctor climbs to the apron and examines the injury under the lights, sometimes wiping it clean first to see how deep it runs and where the blood is going.

What the doctor is assessing is less the size of a cut than its position. A long gash on the forehead that bleeds away from the eyes can be boxed with. A small nick on the eyelid, or a cut through the brow that drops blood straight into the eye, cannot, because a boxer who cannot see punches cannot avoid them. Swelling that has closed an eye is judged in the same way.

Then the doctor tells the referee what he thinks, and the referee decides. That is where the final decision sits under the Board's rules and under the unified rules. Formally the doctor advises. In reality no referee carries on after a doctor has said a boxer should not, and the announcement often says as much: stopped by the referee on the advice of the ringside physician. Some American commissions go further and give their physicians an independent power to end a bout, which is one more way in which the answer depends on where the fight took place.

The heavyweight title fight between Lennox Lewis and Vitali Klitschko in Los Angeles in June 2003 ended like this. Klitschko was cut badly around the left eye, the doctor inspected the wound more than once, and after six rounds advised that he should not continue. The referee stopped it. Klitschko was ahead on all three scorecards and lost by technical knockout.

Cuts: a punch means a TKO defeat, a clash of heads means something else

Henry Cooper lost to Muhammad Ali twice, and both times it was his eyebrows that lost. At Wembley Stadium in June 1963 the fight was stopped in the fifth round with blood running down Cooper's face; at Highbury in May 1966 it was stopped in the sixth for the same reason. Both go down as stoppage defeats. A cut caused by a legal punch is the boxer's own misfortune, and if it ends the fight he loses by technical knockout no matter what the scores were.

The same cut opened by an accidental clash of heads sends the result somewhere else entirely, because then the injury came from a foul, even an unintended one, and it would be unjust for a boxer to lose on it.

1. 1Cut opensThe referee signals at once whether a punch or a clash of heads caused it. That ruling governs everything after.
2. 2Caused by a punchIf the cut later forces a stoppage, the injured boxer loses by technical knockout whatever the scorecards say.
3. 3Accidental head clash, earlyIf the fight is stopped before four rounds have been completed, the result is a technical draw. The mark is two rounds in a four-rounder and three in a six-rounder.
4. 4Accidental head clash, laterPast that mark the cards are added up, the unfinished round included, and the boxer ahead wins a technical decision.

The route depends on what the referee ruled had caused the cut at the moment it opened. Intentional fouls follow a different path, towards a points deduction or a disqualification.

The referee's ruling at the moment of the injury is the hinge. He must say there and then what did the damage, usually with a gesture, tapping his own head for a butt or miming a punch, so that the corners, the judges and the Board's officials all know which route applies if the cut gets worse four rounds later. Replays do not come into it. A cut that the referee called as a punch is a punch.

This produces hard cases. A boxer comfortably ahead who is cut by a clash of heads in the sixth wins a technical decision; the same boxer cut in the same place by a punch loses. The cornermen of a cut fighter have every reason to insist that heads came together, and the referee's unprompted signal exists to stop that argument before it starts. American commissions working to the unified rules call the early version a no decision or no contest where the Board's rules call it a technical draw. The full set of outcomes is covered in our guide to no contests and technical decisions.

RTD, DQ, RSF and RSC: the other codes on a boxing record

A professional record is a column of abbreviations, and KO and TKO are only two of them. The ones a British reader meets most are these.

Code	Stands for	What happened
KO	Knockout	Counted out
TKO	Technical knockout	Stopped by the referee without a full count
RTD	Retired	The corner kept its boxer on the stool between rounds
RSF	Referee stopped fight	The older British term for a TKO
RSC	Referee stopped contest	The amateur term for a TKO
DQ	Disqualification	Thrown out for fouling; the opponent wins
TD	Technical decision	Stopped on an accidental foul and decided on the cards
NC	No contest	No winner or loser recorded

RTD is the one that differs most between countries. In Britain, and in the main record databases, a boxer whose corner pulls him out during the interval has retired, and the number beside it is the last round he boxed. Many American commissions do not use the term and enter the same ending as a TKO. A boxer's tally of knockout wins counts it either way.

RSF is fading. British trade papers and annuals printed "rsf 6" for generations, and plenty of older fighters' records are still written that way, but the international TKO has largely displaced it. In the amateur code RSC is still the official wording, and England Boxing results sometimes carry a suffix to show the reason, such as an injury.

Reading a results line

Take the first Froch and Groves fight as a record would show it: W TKO 9 (12), 1:33. Froch won, by technical knockout, in the ninth round of a contest scheduled for twelve, one minute and thirty-three seconds into the round. The second: W KO 8 (12), 2:43. The bracketed number is the scheduled distance, which is explained in our guide to how many rounds each kind of fight is made over.

A line reading L RTD 5 (10) tells a different story from L KO 5 (10) with no further effort from the reader. In the first a corner made a decision on a stool. In the second a man was on the floor.

Whether the KO vs TKO distinction matters

For most purposes, no.

A boxer's knockout ratio makes no distinction. The familiar summary of a record, wins, losses, draws and the number of wins by knockout, adds full knockouts, technical knockouts and retirements together. A fighter described as having twenty knockouts may never have counted anybody out.

Titles change hands on either. So do purses, rematch clauses and rankings. No sanctioning body treats a champion beaten by technical knockout as any less beaten.

The suspension that follows in Britain

The Board does not much care about the label either, though it cares a great deal about the event. Under its regulations a boxer whose contest is stopped by the referee, other than by disqualification, who is retired by his corner, or who is counted out, has his licence automatically suspended. The period is 28 or 45 clear days, or more, at the discretion of the Board's senior medical officer at the show. Which term applies is that doctor's judgement of what the boxer went through; the regulation does not tie 28 to one kind of ending and 45 to another. A separate regulation stops any boxer using a suspended man as a sparring partner without the Board's written permission, so the ban reaches into the gym. At the end of it he must be certified fit by a doctor before he boxes again.

• 10Seconds to beat the count
• 20Seconds to return if knocked out of the ring
• 28Shorter automatic suspension, in clear days
• 45Longer automatic suspension, in clear days

Counts in seconds are from the Board of Control's Rules of Boxing. The two suspension periods are the ones named in its regulations; the senior medical officer at the show chooses between them and may impose longer.

That is the one place where the manner of a stoppage has a formal consequence, and even there the line is drawn by a doctor's view of what the boxer went through, not by which three letters are on the result sheet.

Where the distinction does matter is reputation. "Never been knocked out" and "never been stopped" are different claims, and boxers and their promoters know it. A man stopped on his feet can say, and many do, that he would have recovered. A man counted out cannot. A technical knockout is an opinion and can be argued with for years; a completed count is a fact.

Early and late stoppages, and the argument from Manchester in 2013

Referees are taught that one punch too early is better than one too late. The reasoning is not sentimental. A premature stoppage costs a boxer a result, perhaps a title, and can be put right with a rematch. A late one cannot be put right at all.

That asymmetry is why officials err early, and it is also why early stoppages draw the louder complaint. The boxer is upright, coherent and furious. The crowd has paid for a finish and been given an intervention. The replay, slowed down, usually shows a man who was hurt but conscious, and it cannot show what the referee saw from eighteen inches away.

Froch against Groves at the Manchester Arena on 23 November 2013 is the documented British case. Groves, the challenger, knocked Froch down with a right hand in the first round and outboxed him for long stretches. In the ninth Froch hurt him and drove him across the ring, and Foster stepped in at 1:33 of the round with Groves still on his feet.

• Groves
• Froch

First judge78points73points

Second judge76points75points

Third judge76points75points

Judges' totals after eight completed rounds, 23 November 2013. Groves led on all three cards; the stoppage came in the ninth.

Show the numbers

The three scorecards when Froch v Groves was stopped

Item	Groves	Froch
First judge	78points	73points
Second judge	76points	75points
Third judge	76points	75points

Groves said his legs were steady and his head clear. Froch said the referee had done his job. The crowd, which had arrived largely behind the champion, booed him. Our view is that it was early but not indefensible: Groves had taken several clean head shots without reply and had begun to turn away, which are precisely the signs a referee is trained to act on, and Foster could not know that the next ten seconds would have been harmless. The IBF ordered the rematch, 80,000 were reported at Wembley for it, and the full story is in our account of Froch v Groves, the stoppage and the rematch.

Late stoppages produce fewer arguments on the night and far worse ones afterwards. Nobody boos a referee for letting a fight continue. The criticism arrives later, from doctors and inquests, and the names attached to those fights are remembered for different reasons. Any honest comparison of the two errors has to start there.

Stoppages nobody judges: three knockdowns, the corner and the boxer himself

Some technical knockouts involve no assessment of the beaten boxer at all.

The three knockdown rule. Where it applies, a boxer knocked down three times in one round loses automatically, and the result is entered as a technical knockout. The referee has no say. It does not apply under the unified rules, which state that the rule is not in effect, and it is not part of the Board's Rules of Boxing, so in Britain a boxer can be floored three times in a round and carry on if the referee is satisfied each time. Where the rule survives and why most authorities dropped it is covered in our guide to the three knockdown rule.

The corner. A manager or chief second who decides his boxer has had enough can end the fight. Between rounds, he tells the referee and the boxer stays on his stool, which a British record shows as RTD. During a round the traditional signal is a towel thrown into the ring. The towel is a signal, not a rule, and referees have been known to ignore one or throw it back out. The details are in our guide to throwing in the towel. When a towel does end a fight mid-round, the result is a technical knockout: David Haye, boxing on a ruptured Achilles tendon against Tony Bellew at the O2 in March 2017, was pulled out by his corner in the eleventh, and the record says TKO 11.

The boxer. A man who turns his back and walks away, tells the referee he does not want to continue or simply declines to come forward has stopped the fight himself. Roberto Duran did it in the eighth round against Sugar Ray Leonard in New Orleans in November 1980. Whatever was or was not said in the ring, the official result was a technical knockout.

Injury belongs here as well. A boxer who damages a shoulder throwing a punch, turns an ankle or breaks a hand so badly he cannot use it loses by technical knockout if he cannot go on, provided no foul caused the injury. The Board's rule covers it in the phrase "unable to continue as a result of injury". It feels unlike a knockout of any kind, and it is recorded as one.

A double knockout and other rarities

Both boxers land at once and both go down. It happens a few times a year somewhere in the world, nearly always with one or both men getting up, and the fight continues as after any other knockdown. The count simply goes on for as long as either man is on the floor.

The question that fascinates people is what happens if neither rises. Professional rule sets that address the point commonly make it a technical draw: nobody won, and the contest is over. Amateur rules have gone to the scorecards as they stood before the punches landed. The Board's Rules of Boxing deal with one man down at a time, so in Britain the outcome would be for the referee and the Board to determine, and the honest position is that the situation is too rare for there to be a settled practice to describe.

The closest thing to a famous case shows why the rule matters. In July 1912, at Vernon in California, the lightweight champion Ad Wolgast and his challenger Joe Rivers hit each other simultaneously in the thirteenth round and both fell. The referee, Jack Welch, counted Rivers out and, by most accounts, helped Wolgast to his feet as he did so. Wolgast kept the title. It has been argued about ever since.

Other endings the books have to cope with

A boxer punched through the ropes and off the ring apron is not automatically beaten. Under the Board's rules he has twenty seconds, double the ordinary count, to get back into the ring unassisted. If he is helped by anyone at ringside, he has not complied.

A knockout delivered after the bell, or after the referee has called break, is a foul. If the boxer who was hit cannot continue, the puncher is liable to be disqualified, or the fight declared a no contest if the blow is judged accidental. What looks like a knockout becomes a disqualification win for the man on the floor.

A knockdown at the very end of a round raises the question of whether the bell rescues the boxer. It does not, under the unified rules or the Board's, in any round including the last: the count continues after the bell, and a boxer who has not risen by ten is knocked out even though the round is over.

And occasionally both boxers are thrown out. A double disqualification leaves no winner, and the record shows a no contest or a loss for each, according to the authority.

Watson v British Boxing Board of Control and what stands beside a British ring

On 21 September 1991 Michael Watson boxed Chris Eubank for the WBO super-middleweight title at White Hart Lane. Watson was ahead and had Eubank down in the eleventh. Eubank got up and landed an uppercut that put Watson down in turn, at the very end of the round. The referee stopped the fight early in the twelfth. Watson collapsed in the ring shortly afterwards with a brain haemorrhage.

What happened next was the subject of the litigation. According to the findings of the court, some seven minutes passed before a doctor attended him in the ring. He was not given oxygen or resuscitated at ringside. He was taken first to a hospital without a neurosurgical unit and then transferred to one that had, losing more time. He survived with permanent injury.

Watson sued the Board. His argument was not that the fight should have been stopped earlier, and not that boxing was unlawful. It was that the Board, which made the rules for every professional contest in the country and required promoters to follow them, had failed to require proper resuscitation facilities at the ringside, and that prompt treatment would have left him far less badly hurt.

The High Court found for him in September 1999. The Board appealed, and on 19 December 2000 the Court of Appeal, with Lord Phillips, the Master of the Rolls, giving the leading judgment, dismissed the appeal.

What the court decided

Three points, in plain terms.

The Board owed Watson a duty of care. It was not a remote rule-maker: it licensed him, set the medical arrangements for his fights and held itself out as responsible for boxers' safety, and he was entitled to rely on it.

That duty went beyond trying to prevent injury. It extended to taking reasonable care that injuries sustained in the ring were properly treated. The court accepted that the Board's rules at the time, which required doctors to attend, did not go far enough, and that it should have required resuscitation equipment and doctors able to use it to be at the ringside.

His consent to fight was not consent to this. A boxer accepts the risk of being hit. He does not accept the risk that the people regulating the sport have made inadequate provision for what follows.

The case is cited now as the one that made a sporting regulator liable in negligence for the content of its own rules.

What changed

The Board had tightened its medical requirements soon after the fight, long before the case was decided, and it is fair to say that the injury changed the rules and the judgment changed the law. The damages left the Board unable to pay. It went into administration, reached a settlement, sold its London headquarters and moved its offices to Cardiff, where they remain.

The present Rules of Boxing carry the lesson in a single clause: a doctor practised in the management of an unconscious or partially conscious patient must be seated at the ringside at all times during a contest, with a minimum of two doctors at every promotion. An ambulance and paramedic crew stand by at British shows, and a fight does not start without them. The referee's wave of the arms, KO or TKO, is no longer where the Board's responsibility ends. It is the point at which a different set of people take over.

That is the practical meaning of a stoppage in Britain now. For more on how the sport is run, see our combat sports section or the complete England guides hub.