Box­er Tian­na Guy has jumped to ninth-ranked in the world in the Women’s feath­er­weight di­vi­sion from 12th, de­spite a con­tro­ver­sial loss to Spain’s Na­yara Ar­royo Ro­driguez 3-2 at the Gold­en Belt Se­ries in Mo­roc­co last month.

Guy, the lone T&T feath­er­weight fight­er, re­al­is­ti­cal­ly has a lot go­ing for her as she at­tempts to qual­i­fy for the Olympic Games in Paris, France, next year.

Present­ly, she is ranked sec­ond in the Pan-Amer­i­can re­gion and can seal an Olympic berth if she man­ages to stay in the top four, which means she will have to bat­tle tooth and nail at this year’s qual­i­fy­ing events, start­ing with the Women’s World Cham­pi­onships in New Del­hi, In­dia from March 13-27.

Guy, a bronze medal­list at the Gold­en Belt Se­ries last year in Mex­i­co, had pub­licly ex­pressed her dis­plea­sure with the re­sult of the fight, say­ing there were too many in­con­sis­ten­cies in the judg­ing.

Since then, Guy has moved on to clinch an­oth­er bronze medal at the re­cent In­de­pen­dence Cup in the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic (Feb­ru­ary 15-20), though go­ing down to the Pan Amer­i­can re­gion’s top-ranked fight­er Ash­ley-Ann Loza­da Mot­ta of Puer­to Ri­co 5-0 last Thurs­day.

Coach Reynold Cox said he was pleased with the progress seen in Guy’s per­for­mance against the Puer­to Ri­can who de­feat­ed her back in 2019 at the Pan Am qual­i­fiers.

“Af­ter two years of fight­ing her, we went back and worked on our prepa­ra­tion, which in­clud­ed dif­fer­ent camps and spar­ring ses­sions with many in­ter­na­tion­al fight­ers.

“The last camps we had were in Puer­to Ri­co and Los An­ge­les in Jan­u­ary and she sparred with Loza­da Mot­ta there, so it is no sur­prise to see the im­prove­ments she made,” Cox ex­plained yes­ter­day.

An­oth­er T&T box­er Aaron Prince was al­so beat­en at the In­de­pen­dence Cup by Puer­to Ri­co’s An­gel Gabriel Llanos Perez 5-0 in the mid­dleweight di­vi­sion. How­ev­er, be­cause of the num­ber of box­ers there, Prince was im­me­di­ate­ly boot­ed out of the tour­na­ment.

Cox said he lat­er gained some much-need­ed warm-up ses­sions with fights against Tyreece Taitt of Bar­ba­dos and an­oth­er Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic box­er, both of which he won. He not­ed that at this time in Prince’s ca­reer, the most they can do is en­sure that he stays very fit and ac­tive al­ways.

He said, like Guy, Prince has shown tremen­dous progress in his fight against Llanos Perez and the more he keeps fight­ing, the bet­ter it will be for him to qual­i­fy for the Olympic Games for a sec­ond time.