Afrigather With a powerful proper jab to the face of her opponent, Elianni Garcia Polledo on Saturday gained the primary official girls’s boxing match in sports-crazed Cuba.
“It’s a historic consequence for Cuban boxing,” stated one of many judges over the loudspeaker when asserting the “unanimous” resolution for Garcia, from Havana province, over Reynabell Grant, from Guantanamo. Each are 27.
Wearing purple and shorter, Garcia tirelessly landed highly effective blows with each arms that hit her opponent’s face, shoulders and stomach a number of occasions.
That’s, till the decisive blow, within the third spherical, left Grant down for the rely and in the end determined the combat.
It was the start of the primary official girls’s boxing program, one thing that many ladies and authorities of this sport anticipated in Cuba, an island that boasts 80 world boxing titles and 41 Olympic gold medals in boxing, together with the legendary Teofilo Stevenson.
Lastly, Cuban sports activities authorities gave a inexperienced mild for ladies on December 5.
“It is a second that we now have been making ready for, for a number of years,” Alberto Puig de la Barca, president of the Cuban Boxing Federation, informed AFP.
Ultimately, there might be 12 females — two for every division, which would be the preselection of the crew for the Central American video games in San Salvador, in August 2023 and different worldwide occasions.
“She (García) simply stored engaged on the offensive, trying to shorten the gap,” Raul Fernandez, 55, certainly one of her trainers, informed AFP on the finish of the combat.
Garcia, who says she got here to boxing from athletics, now seems to be optimistically at her future in boxing.
“I’ve a bittersweet feeling, as a result of I can’t symbolize Cuba,” Namibia Flores informed AFP. At 46, she is six years older than the age most on this sport.
However she could be there outdoors the ring: “Proper now, I’m the one coach and I used to be one of many first ladies who’s coaching since 2006,” she says.
At 70 years outdated and already retired, Nardo Mestre couldn’t miss this second.
He was the coach of Flores and plenty of different ladies for practically 30 years, when, he remembers, Alcides Sagarra, the daddy of the Cuban Boxing College, arrived one afternoon suggesting the necessity to prepare girls.
So “it was by no means permitted. Now it was licensed and I’m already retired, however proud as a result of 5 of the ladies that I skilled are right here at present,” he informed AFP.
Cuba has had feminine illustration in all sports activities, together with weightlifting and wrestling, since 2006, however the final bastion of “sports activities machismo” lengthy was insurmountable: letting girls field.
Ladies’s boxing is now practiced in 187 of the 202 member nations of the Worldwide Boxing Affiliation (IBA).
Ladies made their debut on the London 2012 Olympic Video games, with three divisions.
It has but to be decided if Cuba could possibly be represented by its girls within the subsequent Boxing World Cup in Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, subsequent Could.
