WAL­TER AL­IBEY

wal­ter.al­ibey@guardian.co.tt

T&T box­ers, Olympians Nigel Paul and Aaron Prince, Bless­ing Wal­drop, An­tho­ny Joseph and Don­nell Phillips will hope to cash in on some much-need­ed cash prizes when the 2021 AI­BA World Cham­pi­onships take place in Bel­grade, Ser­bia from Oc­to­ber 22- No­vem­ber 8.

The event is set to be a his­toric one for am­a­teur fight­ers as it will be the first time that monies will be giv­en out.

Ce­cil Forde, the Pres­i­dent of the T&T Box­ing As­so­ci­a­tion re­vealed on Wednes­day that monies amount­ing to US$175,000 will be giv­en out for the top three po­si­tions, for in­stance, a gold medal win­ner will re­ceive US$100,000, a sil­ver medal win­ner US$50,000 and US$25,000 for the third-place fight­er who will al­so re­ceive a bronze medal.

Forde said it will change the face of box­ing in­ter­na­tion­al­ly. Paul, the su­per heavy­weight fight­er who went down to Nige­ria Efe Ajag­ba in the first round of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, al­so missed out on qual­i­fy­ing for the last Tokyo, Japan Olympics and will be ea­ger to re­turn to ac­tion with at­trac­tive mon­ey prizes avail­able.

Prince, the 75kg box­er who be­lieves he won against Slo­va­kian An­drej Cse­mez in his Olympic bout in Japan, could al­so get the op­por­tu­ni­ty to earn hand­some­ly, along with Wal­drop, Joseph and new­com­er Don­nell Phillips. Rawl­son Dop­well and Reynold Cox will be the coach­es for the team at the tour­na­ment, along­side ref­er­ee/judge James Beck­les and for­mer world light fly­weight ti­tle-hold­er Ria Ram­nar­ine, who is now an AI­BA em­ploy­ee.

So far 105 na­tion­al fed­er­a­tions have en­tered with a record of 600 box­ers al­ready reg­is­tered.

Ac­cord­ing to the re­lease: "Our ath­letes have been in a live-in camp for the past 12 months and all are ea­ger for the op­por­tu­ni­ty to com­pete. Our three most se­nior mem­bers, Nigel Paul, Aaron Prince and An­tho­ny Joseph are no strangers to this type of com­pe­ti­tion.

Bless­ing and Phillips are mov­ing up and the ex­pe­ri­ence is go­ing to be of great im­por­tance as they start their jour­ney to the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Our strate­gic plan is a four-year plan that ends an Olympic cy­cle. This means that be­cause of the con­di­tions im­posed on the world at large by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, we have now lost a full year in our prepa­ra­tion. The TT­BA has se­lect­ed six of our most promis­ing young ath­letes who would be mov­ing in­to the se­nior ranks. They have been per­form­ing most cred­itably from school Boys/Girls/Jrs and youth. They are An­tho­ny Joseph, Juan Ro­driguez, Nick­el Joseph, Nyrell Ho­sein, Bless­ing Wal­drop and Don­nell Phillips."