A report from the Related Press.
Legnis Cala Massó rigorously removes her necklace and smiles as her coach slides her vivid crimson boxing gloves over her French tip nails.
The 31-year-old swings her wiry physique into the ring and kilos her fellow boxer – additionally a younger girl – with a collection of punches, simply as she’s completed numerous occasions earlier than.
Right this moment is a day she’s been ready for since she began to field seven years in the past.
Cuban officers introduced Monday that girls boxers would have the ability to compete formally after many years of restrictions, although they didn’t but affirm if that may be taken to an expert degree prefer it was with Cuban male boxers earlier this 12 months.
Nonetheless, it sparked pleasure in ladies like Cala Massó who’ve spent years combating to be acknowledged.
“Saying that boxing just isn’t for Cuban ladies – that’s all the time been the issue,” she stated, leaning on the aspect of a blue boxing ring in downtown Havana. “The place we are actually, we by no means thought we might get right here.”
Cuba is understood worldwide for boxing, dwelling to many legendary male boxers – amongst them Félix Savón, Teófilo Stevenson and Julio César La Cruz – and proprietor of a dozens of Olympic medals within the sport.
However the island has additionally sparked controversy by not permitting ladies to compete, regardless of allowing them to take action in different contact sports activities like taekwondo and wrestling.
Maybe most notably in 2009, the previous head coach of Cuba’s males’s workforce Pedro Roque informed a gaggle of journalists that “Cuban ladies are there to indicate their lovely faces, to not take punches.”
It was a sentiment Cala Massó and different ladies who’ve embraced the game have rejected as they’ve sought to alter the principles.
Boxer Giselle Bello Garcia texts on a cell phone whereas different athletes prepare at a boxing fitness center in Havana, Cuba, Monday, Dec. 5, 2022.
Cala Massó started boxing in Havana with only one different ladies, spending lengthy hours coaching regardless of being turned away by many coaches and boxing rings. With time, curiosity in boxing amongst ladies has solely grown.
On Monday morning, officers with Cuba’s Nationwide Institute for Sports activities, INDER, introduced in a press convention that they’d maintain a contest of 42 ladies boxers in mid-December to decide on 12 athletes for a ladies’s workforce.
The workforce, they stated, will compete within the Central American and Caribbean Video games in El Salvador, their first worldwide debut. The competitors will probably be a primary step towards the 2024 Olympic Video games in Paris. Girls had been first allowed to field within the Olympics in 2012.
Cala Massó, who now trains with 5 different ladies, hopes the choice means their group will solely develop.
The announcement comes shortly after Cuban boxers made a comeback in Might in Mexico, with male boxers competing professionally – and getting paid – for the primary time because the communist authorities prohibited skilled sports activities 60 years in the past. It was an enormous change in a rustic the place athletes, specifically boxers and baseball gamers, commonly go away for paychecks elsewhere.
Down the road, as soon as the workforce is constructed, these ladies may additionally probably compete in an expert capability, INDER officers stated.
In the meantime, they stated Cuban ladies boxers will have the ability to prepare in state sports activities facilities beginning in January.
Emilia Rebecca Hernández, of INDER, stated that the modifications would make it so “Cuban ladies athletes can transfer as much as the place the place they belong – proper subsequent to males.”
But Hernández, who spoke solely briefly, was the one girl on a panel of male officers who stated their delay in permitting ladies to observe the game was as a result of they needed to examine “the dangers that girls may run.”
Girls will put on further padding, they stated.
But for 22-year-old Giselle Bello Garcia, who boxed alongside Cala Massó after having solely began boxing one 12 months earlier for train, stated the information gives them an opportunity to indicate what they’re fabricated from.
“I’ve a brand new hope for all times, as a result of my life has modified. Any more, I’m going to focus solely on boxing,” she stated. “I would like my complete life, up till my dying, to be related to boxing.”
“I’ve to be the perfect,” she added.