India's Olympic-bound boxers to be provided online classes amid COVID-19 lockdown

India's Olympic-bound boxers will be provided online classes from today by their coaches after training halted by the coronavirus-forced national lockdown. Nine Indian boxers M C Mary Kom, Simranjit Kaur, Lovlina Borgohani, Pooja Rani, Amit Panghal, Manish Kaushik, Vikas Krishan, Ashish Kumar and Satish Kumar have qualified for the Tokyo Games, postponed to 2021 due to the global pandemic.

In a conference call with these boxers yesterday, the President of the Boxing Federation of India, Ajay Singh took stock of their preparations amid a national lockdown till April 14 to fight the pandemic. 

He told the boxers that this is a challenging time for all of us and is all the more a reason for us to take care of ourselves stay fit. He asked



them to continue with the exercises as directed by the coaches and try to maintain weights as much as possible.

Elaborating further on the 45-minute discussion, BFI's Executive Director R K Sacheti told that the areas of concern are diet control and mental health.

He said India boxing's High Performance Director Santiago Nieva, who is now in Patiala after completing a 14-day self-isolation period in Delhi, will be conducting classes for men.

The classes for women will be conducted by their high performance director Rafaelle Bergamasco.

India booked an unprecedented nine Olympic slots at the Asian qualifiers in Jordan earlier this month.