Five to six India boxers should qualify for Olympics, opines Santiago Nieva

The Indian boxers have been in cloud nine at the moment with their scintillating recent displays in various tournaments, the most recent of which was the World Boxing Championships. Amit Panghal (52kg) and Manish Kaushik (63kg) won the silver and bronze medals, respectively, in Russia creating history for the nation, which has never won more a single bronze in the tournament.

The Indian pugilists would next be competing in Asia-Oceania qualifiers where they would have eight Olympic spots for grabs— Flyweight (52kg), Featherweight (57kg), Lightweight (63kg), Welterweight (69kg), Middleweight (75kg), Light Heavyweight (81kg), Heavyweight (91kg) and Super Heavyweight (+91kg). And Nieva has estimated that they can qualify in five to six of them.

“The qualifiers will be tremendously tough. We want all eight to qualify but realistically five to six boxers should qualify for the Olympics. In lower weights, there are World Championship and Olympic medallists, so we can’t sleep. We have to ensure that we beat them by enough margin so that there is no doubt in the judges’ minds and that is our challenge,” Nieva said, reported PTI.

In the likes of Phangal, Kaushik, Mary Kom, and others, India have a boxing contingent to be really afraid of and the talent has produced results on various world stages as well. In fact, India would be having boxing as one of their biggest medal hopes for Tokyo. Nieva, however, has called for a more developed infrastructure to take the next step.

“There are many countries who would like to be in our position but in some other ways, we still lack a lot in infrastructure to compare with top nations such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia. They have more complete set up, from grassroots level to all the way up, so that is what we are trying to achieve. Otherwise, it will be very difficult,” Nieva concluded.