The national boxing teams, Black Bombers and Hitters (male and female respectively), are about completing the 1st stage of their high intensity residential camping at the Cape Coast Sports Stadium.
The team has been in Central Regional capital for the past 3 weeks and will return to Accra for the remaining 3 weeks of the residential camping at the Games Village of Accra 2023 on the campus of University of Ghana from 12th February, 2024.
This is an arrangement which will also be used to test the venues and training facilities for the upcoming Africa Games to start next month in Ghana’s administrative and political capital.
The special camping is aimed to fully prepare the boxers for the following major international competitions:
1. First world qualifying tournament l: Boxing Road to Paris – Busto Arsizio – Italy.
(4-11 March, 2024)
2. Road to Africa: seeking gold medals in Accra 2023 – 13th Africa Games,
(15-23 March, 2024)
The team, had earlier undertaken 3 months of non-residential training activities at the Accra Sports Stadium, just few weeks after the debacle at the Africa Olympic qualifiers in Dakar, Senegal in September last year where none of the 12 boxers (male and female) qualified for the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Reinforced with the likes of Ghana’s Tokyo 2020 sole medalist and Africa’s only boxing medal winner, Samuel Takyi, who will now fight at the light welterweight (63.5 kg), Amadu Mohammed and his cousin, the hard fighting light flyweight, Mohammed Aryeetey, welterweight Henry Malm, as well as British-born Ghanaian heavyweight (92 kg), Mark Kojovi Ahondjo.
Samuel Takyi – raring to go again for the Black Bombers
Ghana will likely feature a limited number of boxers(7 males & 2 females) at the Italy qualifiers with focus and priorities on categories that the country has comparative advantages.
This as a result of the leadership of the Ghana Boxing Federation (GBF), managers of the national boxing teams, the Ghana Olympic Committee and the Ministry of Youth & Sports were not impressed with the output of the whole sale participation of boxers at the Dakar challenge especially the females and will rather parade them at Africa games in Accra for the needed exposure and build on that for other international future engagements.
Samuel Takyi – raring to go again for the Black Bombers
Meanwhile, the social media boxing sensation, UK based Ghanaian, Seth Gyimah, better known as Freezy Macbones, has withdrawn from the national team to focus on his professional boxing and promotional activities, thus truncating his dream of fighting at the Olympic Games.
For the records, The Black Bombers remains Ghana’s most successful sporting national team in the country’s participations at major elite international competitions like the Olympic and Commonwealth Games as showcased at immediate past editions where Samuel Takyi (featherweight) won bronze to break the nation’s 29-year medal drought at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, which also represented Africa’s only boxing medal in the Japanese capital which took the West Africa nation’s Olympic medal haul to five (5) with boxing producing four (80%).
Credit: GBF Media
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