Box­er Shantel Adams de­liv­ered on her promise to hand her coun­try an In­de­pen­dence Day gift when she faced Venezue­lan Win­ny­mar Lopez in a ju­nior wel­ter­weight bout at the La Rev­olu­cion Avan­za Sport­ing Cen­tre in Cara­cas, Venezuela, Mon­day.

​In the six-round con­test, the lanky Trinidad and To­ba­go box­er pulled off a unan­i­mous de­ci­sion vic­to­ry de­spite the high-al­ti­tude con­di­tions. The bout was de­scribed as a bruis­ing af­fair af­ter the vast­ly ex­pe­ri­enced Venezue­lan tried to im­pose her ad­van­tage in weight (140 pounds to Adams' 138) and ex­pe­ri­ence. Nev­er­the­less, the judges ruled unan­i­mous­ly in fa­vor of Adams, 58-55 on all score­cards.

​The win ex­tend­ed Adams' un­beat­en pro­fes­sion­al streak to 3-0. Adams, who picked up a shoul­der in­jury dur­ing the fight, told Guardian Me­dia Sports that she re­fused to let any­thing stop her from ful­fill­ing her promise to the coun­try. She al­so de­scribed it as her best fight to date.

"I had a re­al­ly good fight with a tough op­po­nent, but I was able to get the win with a unan­i­mous de­ci­sion. De­spite be­ing in­jured in the fifth round, I got up and fin­ished the fight. It's a fight, so you have to get up and fight re­gard­less of the sit­u­a­tion. So I de­cid­ed to not take it on and fight. I'm a war­rior by heart," Adams said.

"I want­ed to win, so I was not go­ing to stop that fight re­gard­less. This is ac­tu­al­ly my best win be­cause I won the full 6 rounds at a very high al­ti­tude, over 2000 feet, so I was hap­py with the per­for­mance. It was al­so my best fight be­cause she was a tough op­po­nent. She was tough. She kept com­ing, re­gard­less. She could have had a bad knee, a bloody nose, blood all over her body, but she kept com­ing, and I was do­ing the same."

​The vic­to­ry fol­lows her first-round win over Cana­da’s Klaris­sa Mootoo in May at the Riv­er Cree Re­sort & Casi­no in Enoch, Al­ber­ta, Cana­da, and an­oth­er win a month lat­er against Venezuela’s Hei­di Guar­iguan at The Ring in Ciu­dad Carib­ia, Venezuela. Ac­cord­ing to her pro­mot­er and match­mak­er, Boxu Potts, the next step is a re­gion­al ti­tle.
"We will prob­a­bly take one more fight in a month. Then there's a fight in Oc­to­ber in Bar­ba­dos. We'll prob­a­bly look at that, and then we're def­i­nite­ly go­ing to seek ei­ther a Com­mon­wealth, Fede­latin or WBC In­ter­na­tion­al. What­ev­er comes, we'll take it. What­ev­er is avail­able, we're go­ing to go back to the draw­ing board," Potts said.

"We have the lux­u­ry of fight­ing in two weight class­es. We could fight at 130 pounds; we could fight at 135. We could fight at ju­nior wel­ter, 140. So we have that lux­u­ry, and Shantel is pret­ty much com­fort­able go­ing up and com­ing down amongst those class­es. How­ev­er, our main tar­get at this point is Tian­na Guy for the na­tion­al ti­tle, the Trinidad and To­ba­go ti­tle."