Simnikiwe Bongco has dropped his fighting weight, but he is as hungry as ever for silverware at the upcoming world championships.
The Commonwealth Games 75kg bronze medallist, now campaigning one division lower at 71kg, jets off to Russia as part of the four-man South African team for a two-week training camp in Sochi.
From there Bongco, John Masamba (63.5kg), Birmingham 2022 teammate Amzolele Dyeyi (57kg), and Sinovuyo Mthintelwa (51kg) head to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, for the global tournament that has become increasingly controversial amid sport politics, and could be hit by boycotts.
A new body called World Boxing was formed this week to counter the Russian-led International Boxing Association (IBA) which — already under suspension by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for various offences — has angered some countries by allowing Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete under their own flags.
Open boxing, as the amateur game is now known, is splintering, like its professional counterpart, but action-starved fighters like Bongco just want to trade leather. “We don’t get to travel to tournaments a lot,” said Bongco, a product of Duncan Village in East London. “We take our talent and hard work to those games — this will be my first fight this year,” he said.
After he was eliminated in the semifinals at Birmingham 2022 by an Australian, he pointed out that that was the first international opponent from outside Africa he had faced. “Ever since then, I’ve been working [on improving].
“Yeah, it’s a hard thing to do. I don’t want to lie, it’s hard because you’re working on something that you think you know — you watch these fights, you study them — but you can’t put it into practice.
“When you’re someone like me, you come from nothing, you want something more. You’re hungry for these games and you’ve just got to adjust.”
Bongco is eager to capitalise on the training camp, which is expected to include four other nations. “That’s something big. I think it will play a big role and it’s going to be up to us to how we use it. I want to take advantage and get the type of experience I need.”
Because the men’s 75kg class is no longer at the Olympics, Bongco has dropped to 71kg to try to get to Paris 2024. “I’m on weight already. I feel faster, more flexible and stronger,” he said.
South Africa, once an Olympic boxing powerhouse that won 19 medals before isolation in the early 1960s, has never claimed silverware at a world championships. But head coach Hans Britz is plotting to change that next month. “If we can just give our boys the required experience [at the training camp], it will be perfect,” he said.
“That will boost their performance … At least it can offer our guys the opportunity to do high-performance training and for the coaches to learn more about high-performance training.
“Hopefully we can win a medal. That’s the only reason I’m going — to win a medal. Nothing else is good enough for me.”
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