RIO DE JANEIRO — The wink would not stand.

Late in the third round Sunday, Gary Antuanne Russell saw his opponent, Wuttichai Masuk of Thailand, bat his eye at him. He decided to respond in kind, no matter how much the circumstances demanded otherwise. Less than 30 seconds remained in the light welterweight preliminary Olympic bout, and Russell needed the round to move on. And yet Russell raised his arms over his head, showed Masuk his palms and danced on his tip-toes, inviting scorn from all corners: the crowd, the opponent and, mostly crucially, the judges.

“I was like, OK,” Russell said. “If he's going to showboat, I'm going to showboat, too.”

Russell survived both Masuk and the ill-timed taunt to advance to the quarterfinals. With a victory over Uzbekistan's Fazliddin Gaibnazarov in his next fight, Russell will clinch an Olympic medal, an unprecedented feat for a family — the fighting Gary Russell clan of Capitol Heights — that has accomplished almost everything else there is to accomplish in boxing.

Russell's victory continued a revival for the U.S. men's boxing team, which is now 11-3 in the Olympics under first-year coach Billy Walsh, an Irishman. Before Russell's victory, Newark's Shakur Stevenson won his Olympic debut in a bantamweight preliminary over Brazilian Robenilson De Jesus. Both Russell and Stevenson are gold-medal contenders, but Russell barely squeaked into the quarterfinals.

Russell took the first round with ease, and in the second, he tried to change the fight's tempo. “I just wanted to see how much gas he had in his gas tank,” Russell said. The strategy backfired. Masuk popped Russell twice in the face, once sending his mouthpiece flying about 30 feet across the ring. Russell said he needs to re-boil the guard so it will fit tighter and stay in his mouth.

“That's a bad look,” Russell said. “I don't need that rap.”

“He did everything we were asking him, and then he switched off,” Walsh said. “So I said, ‘What the hell is going on here?'?”

Russell came out for the third round as the aggressor, but Masuk landed enough body shots to keep it a close fight down to the wire. It didn't stop Russell from prancing in the ring, self-assured of victory, with about 25 seconds left.

“I told him to stop, because they don't like us as it is,” Walsh said. “Do you want to give them an excuse with the showboating? Amateur boxing judges, they don't like that. You can't take anything for granted with these judges.”

Judges from Ukraine and Poland gave Russell the victory while the Danish judge favored Masuk.

“I can't say whether it's fair or not, because it's up to the judges,” Masuk said.