With thanks to Combat Australia.
Since qualifying 12 boxers to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in December 2023, it has been a busy six months of activity for the Australian Boxing Team.
Whilst a major priority of the program has been the preparation of this group of boxers for Paris, CombatAUS and Boxing Australia recognise the importance of this period in continuing to provide targeted activity and development for other athletes who have strong claims for the next cycle of major events.
Through the direct investment of Commonwealth Games Australia’s (CGA) Green2Gold2Great program, CombatAUS and Boxing Australia have been able to also maintain a strong focus on the development of the sport’s next generation through ongoing domestic and international camp and competition opportunities.
The CGA’s investment has directly enabled an extended group of Australian National Program boxers to gain access and exposure to two high quality multi-nations camps at the AIS in January and March 2024 involving Brazil, Philippines, Sweden, Tonga, and of course our own Olympic qualified boxers.
To have such high quality teams in Australia is of huge benefit to the program and it is great to have been able to leverage this high quality activity to provide world class international training and competition sparring opportunities for a broader group of National program boxers.
The Australian team then recently completed a tour of USA, training in a multi-nations camp out of the USA Olympic Training Centre in Colorado Springs for 10 days before competing at the USA Boxing International Invitation in Pueblo against 15 other countries.
The ability to fund additional boxers to this activity has allowed the group to gain more international exposure in a world class environment, alongside world class boxers.
It also saw CGA Green2Gold2Great invested boxers Ikenna Enyi (92kg), Jye Dixon (51kg) and Jaggar Altoft (63.5kg) finish in the medals winning silver, bronze and bronze respectively – emphasising the broader performance potential of Australian boxing.
Without the CGA’s Green2Gold2Great investment, our high performance program would only have financial capacity at this point in the cycle to cover costs for Olympic team preparations, leaving a gap in development opportunities during this time for broader National program boxers.
This CGA investment is positively impacting the development of Australia’s next generation of boxers and puts the program in a great position to launch into the 2026 Commonwealth Games campaign.
