Worlds silver medallist Amit Panghal fails to make cut for IBA Men’s World Boxing Championships

2019 Asian Championships silver medallist Deepak Bhoria will instead represent India in the 51kg weight class where Panghal won the gold medal at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games last year.

Worlds silver medallist Amit Panghal. (PTI Photo)

Listen to this article

00:00

1x 1.5x 1.8x

Amit Panghal, a silver medallist at the 2019 AIBA World Boxing Championships, is not in the 13-member Indian squad for upcoming edition of the World Boxing Championships, to be held at Uzbekistan’s Tashkent from April 30 to May 14.

2019 Asian Championships silver medallist Deepak Bhoria will instead represent India in the 51kg weight class where Panghal won the gold medal at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games last year.

Panghal’s omission from the side comes after the Boxing Federation of India (BFI), under the recommendation of High Performance Director Bernard Dunne, replaced the concept of selection trials for big-ticket tournaments with an evaluation process at the national camp.

Story continues below this ad

The evaluation process was carried out over three weeks of March, where all the boxers in the camp were allotted scores on various criteria by three different members of the Indian boxing set-up.

Panghal scored a total of 682 points over the three weeks: 238 points on evaluation conducted in the second week of March, 223 on the third week of March and 221 points on week 4. Meanwhile, Bhoria got 247, 247 and 237 points in the corresponding evaluation days.

Dunne was part of the evaluators.

Fighting in the 51kg flyweight category, Bhoria announced himself on the global stage in 2021 when he defeated the 2016 Rio Olympic gold medallist and 2019 World Champion Shakhobidin Zoirov of Uzbekistan at the Strandja Memorial tournament.

The Indian team will leave for Tashkent on April 17, where boxers will attend a multi-nation training camp before the World Championships. In the seven Olympic weight categories – 51kg, 57kg, 63.5kg, 71kg, 80kg, 92kg and 92+kg – two boxers from India will participate in the training camp.

Story continues below this ad

The Tashkent World Championships have seen 640 boxers from 104 countries register already. Gold medallists at the event will win an eye-watering sum of $2,00,000 while silver medallists will earn $1,00,000. The two bronze medallists in every category will be awarded $50,000 each.

INDIAN SQUAD: Govind Sahani (48kg), Deepak Bhoria (51kg), Sachin Siwach (54kg), Mohammad Hussamuddin (57kg), Varinder Singh (60kg), Shiva Thapa (63.5kg), Akash Sangwan (67kg), Nishant Dev (71kg), Sumit Kundu (75kg), Ashish Chaudhary (80kg), Harsh Choudhary (86kg), Naveen Kumar (92kg) and Narender Berwal (92+kg).