Box­er Nigel Paul's hopes of stay­ing alive in the fi­nal Olympic Box­ing Qual­i­fiers in Bangkok, Thai­land came to a crash­ing end, cour­tesy of a 4-1 de­feat by George Ho­la of New Zealand, Wednes­day.

The loss al­so took with it the hopes of an Olympic spot for T&T.

Paul's men's 92kg Su­per Heavy­weight bout was the last chance for T&T af­ter all the oth­er T&T box­ers were beat­en dur­ing the course of Sat­ur­day to Tues­day. On Sat­ur­day, Car­los Suarez put in a dis­grace­ful per­for­mance that saw him be­ing dis­qual­i­fied, and the very next day, Aaron Prince, the 2020 Tokyo, Japan Olympian, went down heav­i­ly 5-0 to Ser­gio Mar­tinez of Spain in the men's 71kg fight.

Lat­er on Mon­day, the pair of Tian­na Guy and Je­re­mi­ah Thomas per­ished by sim­i­lar 5-0 re­sults to Vil­ma Vi­ita­nen of Fin­land in the women's 60kg di­vi­sion and al­so to Fi­ji's Sarat­i­bau Amini­asi in the men's 80kg fights, re­spec­tive­ly.

Paul re­turned from a shoul­der in­jury and opt­ed to skip a live-in camp in Thai­land ahead of the com­pe­ti­tion. But yes­ter­day, he strug­gled for the most part of the fight with on­ly Judge Mansur Muhid­di­nov of Tajik­istan giv­ing him a pass­ing grade of 30-27.

The oth­er four judges - Ab­der­raz­zak Mouh­ni of France, Sid Ali Mokre­tari of Al­ge­ria, Ra­doslav Si­mon of Slo­va­kia, and Ka­bi­lan Ashok Sai of In­dia all called the fight 27-30, 27-30, 27-30 and 28-29 re­spec­tive­ly, all in favour of the New Zealan­der.

Na­tion­al coach Reynold Cox could not be reached for a com­ment, how­ev­er, T&T Box­ing As­so­ci­a­tion (TT­BA) pres­i­dent Ce­cil Forde con­firmed the end of the coun­try's qual­i­fy­ing hopes, say­ing he thanked the fight­ers for their ef­forts but said his as­so­ci­a­tion will now have to do things dif­fer­ent­ly, con­sid­er­ing the many changes in the sport.

From the Thai­land qual­i­fiers, some 600-plus fight­ers were bat­tling for ap­prox­i­mate­ly 51 spots at the Olympics. Forde ex­plained that the qual­i­fiers were made even more dif­fi­cult by the in­clu­sion of pro­fes­sion­al box­ers in it, not­ing such a predica­ment makes even more im­por­tant now the need for his as­so­ci­a­tion to en­gage in pro­fes­sion­al bouts.

The first Pro-Am (Pro­fes­sion­al and Am­a­teur) card is sched­uled to box off on June 8 at the Jer­ry Junc­tion in Wa­ter­loo.

The TT­BA will now fo­cus on a four-year win­dow in which key prepa­ra­tion has to be done. Forde par­tic­u­lar­ly thanked Olympians Paul, Prince and Suarez for their con­tri­bu­tion to the sport.