Prepa­ra­tion for the Pan Amer­i­can Youth Games in Colom­bia next month has be­gun in earnest for T&T.

Juan Ro­driguez is the lone box­er to qual­i­fy for T&T, and on Tues­day he left for a two-week live-in camp in Guyana with coach Kirt Sin­nette to con­tin­ue their prepa­ra­tion.

Ce­cil Forde, pres­i­dent of the T&T Box­ing As­so­ci­a­tion (TT­BA), ex­plained the rea­sons why Guyana was the des­ti­na­tion of choice for the train­ing camp, not­ing that the large vol­ume of box­ers in Guyana, will in­crease the qual­i­ty of glove-work that Ro­driguez needs ahead of the Games.

He al­so ex­plained that T&T and Guyana have shared a good re­la­tion­ship in the sport in the past.  

Ro­driguez, a com­peti­tor in the fly­weight (48-52kg) di­vi­sion, punched his tick­et to the games in Cali, Colom­bia, by de­feat­ing Wayne Castel­lo of Guyana by a third-round stop­page. With the vic­to­ry, Ro­driguez earned the right to face-off with Luis Al­varez of Colom­bia in the quar­ter­fi­nals, which he even­tu­al­ly lost.

Ro­driguez's coach Sin­nette, was al­so care­ful­ly picked, be­ing one of on­ly four box­ers from T&T to qual­i­fy for the Olympic Games.

Forde told Guardian Me­dia Sports yes­ter­day that Ro­driguez is among a group of young box­ers be­ing pre­pared for the fu­ture.

"Three oth­er box­ers cur­rent­ly at the AI­BA World Cham­pi­onships, An­tho­ny Joseph, Don­nell Phillips and Bless­ing Wal­drop will be joined by Ro­driguez in the group, ahead of the ul­ti­mate goal which is the Olympic Games in France.

"Be­fore that, how­ev­er, there will be oth­er tour­na­ments to com­pete in, in­clu­sive of the Com­mon­wealth Games next year, the Pan Amer­i­can Games, the Cen­tral Amer­i­can and Caribbean Games (CAC), and the Con­ti­nen­tal Cham­pi­onships that box­ers will be re­quired to per­form at in prepa­ra­tion for France," Forde ex­plained.

At the World Cham­pi­onship in Bel­grade, Ser­bia, Joseph was the on­ly box­er from T&T to have pro­gressed from the first round, cour­tesy of a walk-over vic­to­ry over Niv­en Chem­ben of Mau­ri­tius.

The TT­BA's de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme, ac­cord­ing to Forde, al­so in­cludes a cur­rent­ly-on­go­ing live-in camp for fe­male box­ers in Ire­land, which is cur­rent­ly be­ing at­tend­ed by Tian­na Guy.

She is tar­get­ing ac­tion at the AI­BA World Fe­male Cham­pi­onships in Turkey at the end of the year. Fund­ing for Guy's camp came through the Min­istry of Sports and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment's Elite Ath­letes Fund­ing process, while the Guyana camp was cov­ered by the T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee.