A T&T Mixed Mar­tial Arts team flew the flag with much pride at the Mixed Mar­tial Arts GAM­MA World Cham­pi­onships in Sao Paulo, Brazil, ear­li­er this month.

The team won 14 medals over­all at the cham­pi­onships, com­pris­ing two gold medals, sev­en sil­ver medals, and five bronze medals. Re­nee For­tune was one of two gold medal win­ners; she claimed a win in the un­der-16 girls 62 kg, while the sec­ond gold medal for the red, white and black came from Aleem Alex Khan in the Un­der-21 men’s 83.9 kg strik­ing MMA di­vi­sion.

The lo­cal con­tin­gent of 14 ath­letes com­pet­ed across var­i­ous di­vi­sions, which led to an over­all 12th rank among the par­tic­i­pants from over 60 coun­tries and sev­enth in the medal haul, which to­geth­er was a his­toric achieve­ment for the twin-is­land re­pub­lic.

“We were the small­est na­tion out of 66-plus coun­tries, and we placed sev­enth in the medal haul of how many medals were at­tained by each coun­try, and now we are now ranked 12th in the world, and this is our first time at a World Cham­pi­onships,” pres­i­dent of the Mixed Mar­tial Arts As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T Adam Chin Le­ung Kam said.

Khan al­so won a sil­ver medal at the cham­pi­onships when he lost out in the U-21 men’s 79.4 kg MMA. In ad­di­tion to him, oth­er sil­ver medals were com­ing from Eli­jah Cud­joe in the U-10 di­vi­sion boys’ 38 kg MMA, John Mark Ba­boolal in the U-10 boys’ 30 kg MMA, De­nahi Gus­tav, who won two sil­ver medals in the U-12 boys’ 42 kg and 46 kg MMA, So­nia Ba­boolal in the U-16 girls’ 50 kg MMA, and Joshua Coop­er in the U-21 men’s 83.9 kg Strik­ing MMA.

The five bronze medals came from Kai-El Grant (U-12 boys 30 kg MMA), Che­don Grant (U-16 boys 54 kg MMA), Eli Jack­ie (U-16 boys 50 kg MMA), Kay­lon Khan (U-18 boys 79.4 kg MMA), and Coop­er, who got his sec­ond medal of the tour­na­ment in the U-21 men 83.9 kg MMA.

The team re­turned on Wednes­day morn­ing to a wel­come re­cep­tion at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port.

Le­ung Kam told Guardian Me­dia Sports hours af­ter touch­ing down, “It was a fan­tas­tic mo­ment; it was a his­tor­i­cal mo­ment for T&T, and of course, be­ing part of that with the team is some­thing that we will car­ry on with us for the rest of our lives. Four­teen ath­letes went to the World Cham­pi­onships, and we came back with 14 medals, two world cham­pi­ons, sev­en sil­ver medals and five bronze.

“We were the small­est na­tion out of 66-plus coun­tries, and we placed sev­enth in the medal haul of how many medals were at­tained by each coun­try, and now we are ranked 12th in the world, and this is our first time at a World Cham­pi­onships,” Le­ung Kam said.

The achieve­ment of the team came cour­tesy of hard work and com­mit­ment, de­spite lit­tle fi­nan­cial sup­port; how­ev­er, Le­ung Kam as­sured the coun­try will be aware of the tremen­dous tal­ent that ex­ists in an­oth­er sport.

“To tell you the ded­i­ca­tion and the love for the sports that these ath­letes have, they paid their en­tire way on their own, so they got fund­ing on their own through fam­i­ly and friends and so on to get there be­cause we had lit­tle to no sup­port. We had very few cor­po­rate spon­sors, and of course, the Min­istry of Sports was go­ing through its tran­si­tion through the dif­fer­ent gov­ern­ments, so they were no help.

“But hope­ful­ly, with what we were able to achieve this time and where we’re ranked now on a world lev­el, the pow­ers that be can see that apart from track and field and foot­ball and crick­et, there are oth­er sports oth­er than foot­ball and track and field and crick­et that we can go and be world cham­pi­ons in,” Le­ung Kam said.