No personal coach for boxer Amit Panghal

NEW DELHI: The Boxing Federation of India (BFI) has politely turned down boxer Amit Panghal’s demand for a personal coach and physio to shore up his Tokyo Olympics preparations. The BFI has cited both rules and the fear of being flooded with such requests from other elite boxers as reasons for rejecting the reigning Asian Games champion’s request. The federation argued that the current coaching set-up comprising of high performance director Santiago Nieva, coaches C A Kuttappa and Dharmendra Yadav, among others, were well-equipped to handle the training and conditioning needs of senior national campers and Tokyo hopefuls.Amit, one of the country’s biggest medal hopes in boxing in Tokyo, had asked the federation to attach his childhood coach Anil Kumar Dhankar, and veteran physio Dr Rohit Kashyap with him at the ongoing camp in Bellary, Karnataka up until the Tokyo Games. However, the BFI’s coaches’ commission and selection committee members have expressed their reservation in endorsing any such move which not only threatened the strong coaching fundamentals of the federation but could also lead to unsavoury charges of favouritism by other boxers.It is learnt that BFI was ready to test Dhankar with the youth category (under-19) boxers before promoting him to the senior rank. This exercise will primarily be done keeping the 2024 Paris Olympics in mind. The BFI believes that with just six months left for Tokyo, the time is too short to employ someone directly in the senior coaching set-up as this could complicate things among coaches. Moreover, Santiago & Co have been doing a fantastic job and Amit’s medal triumphs post the Gold Coast CWG silver have come under the present coaching set-up. “To be honest, we don’t know much about Dhankar’s coaching credentials,” a BFI official said.TOI understands that a senior BFI functionary had recently circulated a draft of coaching policy for the camp among federation office-bearers, which talked about having a “gradation of all coaches” registered with the BFI with an aim to scale down non-performing coaches. “In spite of having so many qualified AIBA Star Coaches, at times it has been observed that new coaches who are not even AIBA Star or have performed badly at the AIBA Star examinations, are brought into the camp just to please certain individuals or states/ boards,” the policy read.