Four out of sev­en T&T box­ers were vic­to­ri­ous on Fri­day, the open­ing day of the Caribbean Box­ing Cham­pi­onships in St Lu­cia.

Among them was Nigel Paul, the coun­try's su­per heavy­weight fight­er, who made an un­for­get­table ap­pear­ance at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2016. Paul on Fri­day at the Beause­jour In­door Fa­cil­i­ty, out punched Em­manuel Pom­pey of Guyana on points and main­tained his po­si­tion as the top box­er in the T&T con­tin­gent.

Paul's pol­ished ca­reer in­clud­ed a bronze medal at the World Cham­pi­onships in Bel­grade, Ser­bia in 2021, mak­ing him the on­ly box­er from T&T and the Caribbean to have achieved such a feat.

For na­tion­al coach Vic­ki Boodram though, her stand­out fight­er's award went to Don­nell Phillip who faced a her­culean task against against a well-ex­pe­ri­enced Joshua Tou­s­saint of An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, yet he pre­vailed in the end.

Phillip, re­cent­ly pro­mot­ed to the coun­try's elite team, gave his blood, sweat and tears to de­feat Tou­s­saint on points in a cru­cial elite 63.5kg semi­fi­nal con­test to book his place in the fi­nal.

Mean­while, Aaron Prince, an­oth­er elite fight­er who rep­re­sent­ed the coun­try with cred­it at the 2020 Tokyo, Japan Olympic Games, claimed an easy walk-over win over Kee­gan Mort­ley of St Lu­cia in a 75kg semi­fi­nal con­test, much to the dis­like of the home crowd, while Jadeon Castil­lano pulled off a hard-fought unan­i­mous-de­ci­sion vic­to­ry over Arthur Lan­gel­li­er of St Lu­cia in an elite semi­fi­nal 71kg bout.

Both Prince and Castil­lano earned the right to con­test the fi­nals which would take place to­day.

On the oth­er hand, Paul Newal­lo, Ner­aj Ma­hadeosingh and Med Charles were all beat­en on Fri­day.

Newal­lo, the son of the coach, went down to Guade­loupe's Hugo Amounie in the round of four semis of the Youth 71kg by split de­ci­sion, and Charles made his ex­it from the tour­na­ment by way of los­ing on points to Guyana's Ter­roz Wint in the youth 67kg semi­fi­nals.

How­ev­er, Boodram was not sure of Ma­hadeo's loss to Yuri­ah De Sil­va of An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, the T&T's coach said she saw a dif­fer­ent re­sult.

Ma­hadeosingh was beat­en on a split de­ci­sion in an elite 60kg semi­fi­nal bout that pre­vent­ed his progress to the fi­nal. Boodram told the me­dia that Ma­hadeosingh, a ju­nior en­ter­ing the fray of the elites, left it all in the ring to com­pete with an op­po­nent with loads more ex­pe­ri­ence than him, and he could have won.

"He did every­thing he could have done to win the fight, so I don't un­der­stand why he lost, I guess the judges' de­ci­sion is fi­nal. From what I see, I am just do­ing my as­sess­ment of the box­ers, and I can tell you that both the ju­nior and elite box­ers have some work to do. For the ju­nior, they need to work on their strength and con­di­tion­ing. I think they have good tech­nique so once we work on the strength and con­di­tion­ing part of it, they would be good," Boodram as­sured yes­ter­day.

"For the se­nior box­ers, they need to be more tech­ni­cal­ly sound. They have strength and con­di­tion, but their tech­nique is off. We are go­ing to en­gage in a de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme that will en­tail ex­ten­sive work on tech­nique and strength and con­di­tion­ing work so that we can find a bal­ance mov­ing for­ward," Boodram said.