Nicholas Clarke

Mul­ti­ple world fly­weight cham­pi­on Ria Ram­nar­ine is call­ing on cor­po­rate T&T to in­vest in lo­cal box­ing fol­low­ing the post­pone­ment of Uni­fied Box­ing Pro­mo­tions and Floyd Trum­pet Fight Pro­duc­tions' Night of the Cham­pi­ons card, which was sched­uled to take place on June 25.Be­cause of a lack of fund­ing for the event, which is bud­get­ed at ap­prox­i­mate­ly $1 mil­lion, Ram­nar­ine will now have to wait un­til late Ju­ly to de­fend her WBC Cabofe, WIBF, WI­BA and GBU Fly­weight ti­tles against Colom­bia's May­er­li Al­ta­mar.

Speak­ing to the Guardian, the 32-year-old said that the sport was de­pend­ing on cor­po­rate as­sis­tance for its sur­vival."Box­ing has al­ways had to fight for spon­sor­ship and it's a con­tin­u­ing bat­tle. It takes a lot of mon­ey to pull off a suc­cess­ful card so more back­ers will need to come on board. It's dis­ap­point­ing but there isn't much that I can do about it."Ram­nar­ine sug­gest­ed that some or­gan­i­sa­tions were hes­i­tant to as­so­ciate them­selves with the sport due to its com­bat­ive na­ture.

"There are cer­tain com­pa­nies that don't want to get in­volved in con­tact sports. I don't know if it's be­cause they con­sid­er it vi­o­lent or bru­tal, but we re­al­ly need the spon­sors to give us a chance to show what we are ca­pa­ble of. If we don't get the sup­port, the box­ers won't be able to reach their po­ten­tial."Al­lud­ing to Uni­fied Box­ing Pro­mo­tions' fre­quent crit­ics, Friends of Box­ing, Ram­nar­ine said she hoped the two par­ties could set aside their dif­fer­ences and work to­geth­er in the fu­ture."Like any oth­er sport, there are al­ways is­sues in box­ing, and there is a group that is cur­rent­ly say­ing neg­a­tive things about the pro­mo­tion. I don't know if that is di­rect­ly hin­der­ing the card it­self, but I think maybe if every­body came to­geth­er un­der one um­brel­la it would def­i­nite­ly help the sit­u­a­tion."

She added that her prepa­ra­tions for the fight were go­ing well and that af­ter spend­ing three weeks train­ing with Bon­nie Cani­no in Flori­da, her man­age­ment team in T&T had been im­pressed with her im­prove­ments.The card is al­so set to fea­ture five oth­er ti­tle fights pit­ting Loris­sa Ri­vas against Alek­san­dra Lopes (WBC/IBF World Light Heavy­weight), Floyd Trum­pet against Juan Bo­nan­ni (WBU/UBO World, WBC Cabofe Wel­ter­weight) and Kirt Sin­nette (WBC Cabofe Su­per Mid­dleweight), Ker­ston Man­swell (WBC Cabofe Heavy­weight) and Nigel 'Cow' Ed­wards (WBC Cabofe) against op­po­nents that have yet to be named.