The year 2022 is shap­ing up to be a good one for the sport of box­ing, pres­i­dent of the T&T Box­ing As­so­ci­a­tion Ce­cil Forde has said.

The lo­cal box­ing boss has led the way in do­ing the ground­work in an­tic­i­pa­tion of hav­ing the sport go on as in pre­vi­ous years.

Now, he is plan­ning to have in-the-ring box­ing ac­tion, start­ing with the Na­tion­al Cham­pi­onships, which was among many oth­er box­ing tour­na­ments to have been af­fect­ed by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic over the past two years.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia Sports on Tues­day Forde said: "2022 looks very promis­ing, we have done a lot of ground­work and as long as we re­main fo­cused our achieve­ments will be great. Our main achieve­ment so far has been our abil­i­ty to con­tin­u­ous­ly keep qual­i­fy­ing our ath­letes at the high­est lev­el, and now that we are win­ning medals on the in­ter­na­tion­al cir­cuit, it clear­ly shows that our coach­es and our tech­ni­cal team have suc­cess­ful­ly made the tran­si­tion from the Caribbean to world-class box­ing."

This tran­si­tion was aid­ed by a de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme that catered for all cat­e­gories of box­ers, in­clu­sive of the elites, youths and ju­niors and ladies al­most three years ago.

Last year, the coun­try's su­per heavy­weight box­er Nigel Paul was a ben­e­fi­cia­ry of the pro­gramme, qual­i­fy­ing for the World Cham­pi­onships where he won a bronze medal; mid­dleweight fight­er Aaron Prince com­pet­ed at an Olympic Games for the first time in Tokyo, Japan; ju­nior box­ers Nyrell Ho­sein and Juan Ro­driguez con­test­ed the Pan Youth Games qual­i­fiers in Colom­bia where on­ly Ro­driguez qual­i­fied; Bless­ing Wal­drop (63kg), An­tho­ny Joseph (60kg) and Don­nell Phillips (57kg) all had their first taste of World Cham­pi­onships box­ing, while Tian­na Guy, the lone T&T fe­male box­er was sent to an Irish box­ing pro­gramme to fol­low up on her stay at the lo­cal de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme here.

He said: " Present­ly our team for 2024 is al­ready in prepa­ra­tion. Our great­est chal­lenge would be to keep them to­geth­er and fo­cus. Fund­ing would be our num­ber one pri­or­i­ty. The path­way to Paris 2024 be­gins this year. In March it's the Con­ti­nen­tal Cham­pi­onships in Ecuador, which will be a rank­ing for our ath­letes. Then there's Fe­male World Cham­pi­onships in May in Turkey and Com­mon­wealth Games in Ju­ly/Au­gust. We are still await­ing word on the Caribbean Games to be held in Guade­loupe, and the Caribbean Cham­pi­onships."

He con­tin­ued: "Lo­cal­ly, we have set Jan­u­ary 28th, 29th and 30th to host our Na­tion­al Cham­pi­onship, but this is sole­ly de­pen­dent on the gov­ern­ment giv­ing the ok for sports to re­sume, es­pe­cial­ly con­tact sports. We are present­ly prepar­ing for this as we are mak­ing the nec­es­sary pro­pos­als to the nec­es­sary Min­istries in­volved, and we're hav­ing se­ri­ous di­a­logues with all our mem­bers. Get­ting every­one func­tion­ing is im­por­tant. We are look­ing for­ward with great an­tic­i­pa­tion to the pro­posed Com­mu­ni­ty Box­ing Pro­gramme, which is be­ing spear­head­ed by the T&T Box­ing Board of Con­trol will get the ap­proval of the Min­istry of Sports and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment.

This will be a ma­jor achieve­ment for the de­vel­op­ment of box­ing lo­cal­ly and would play a ma­jor role in com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op­ment pro­grammes."

Forde said their de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme and all the oth­er achieve­ments of the sport could not have been done with the in­volve­ment of the Min­istry of Sports and its min­is­ter, the TTB­BC, AI­BA, the spon­sors, coach­es, tech­ni­cal staff, ref­er­ees, judges, par­ents, me­dia and most of all the ath­letes.