Boxer Legnis Cala, heart, talks with fellow feminine boxers throughout a coaching session in Havana, Cuba, Monday, Dec. 5, 2022. Cuban officers introduced on Monday that ladies boxers would be capable of compete for the primary time ever.

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Boxer Legnis Cala, heart, talks with fellow feminine boxers throughout a coaching session in Havana, Cuba, Monday, Dec. 5, 2022. Cuban officers introduced on Monday that ladies boxers would be capable of compete for the primary time ever.

Ramon Espinosa/AP

HAVANA — Legnis Cala Massó fastidiously removes her necklace and smiles as her coach slides her vibrant pink boxing gloves over her French tip nails.

The 31-year-old swings her wiry physique into the ring and kilos her fellow boxer – additionally a younger girl – with a collection of punches, simply as she’s carried out numerous occasions earlier than.

Today is a day she’s been ready for since she began to field seven years in the past.

Cuban officers introduced Monday that ladies boxers would be capable of compete formally after a long time of restrictions, although they did not but verify if that might be taken to knowledgeable degree prefer it was with Cuban male boxers earlier this 12 months.

Still, it sparked pleasure in ladies like Cala Massó who’ve spent years combating to be acknowledged.

“Saying that boxing is not for Cuban women – that’s always been the problem,” she mentioned, leaning on the aspect of a blue boxing ring in downtown Havana. “Where we are now, we never thought we would get here.”

Cuba is understood worldwide for boxing, house to many legendary male boxers – amongst them Félix Savón, Teófilo Stevenson and Julio César La Cruz – and proprietor of a dozens of Olympic medals within the sport.

But the island has additionally sparked controversy by not permitting ladies to compete, regardless of allowing them to take action in different contact sports activities like taekwondo and wrestling.

Perhaps most notably in 2009, the previous head coach of Cuba’s males’s crew Pedro Roque informed a gaggle of journalists that “Cuban women are there to show their beautiful faces, not to take punches.”

It was a sentiment Cala Massó and different ladies who’ve embraced the game have rejected as they’ve sought to vary the principles.

Boxer Giselle Bello Garcia texts on a cell phone whereas different athletes prepare at a boxing gymnasium in Havana, Cuba, Monday, Dec. 5, 2022.

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Boxer Giselle Bello Garcia texts on a cell phone whereas different athletes prepare at a boxing gymnasium in Havana, Cuba, Monday, Dec. 5, 2022.

Ramon Espinosa/AP

Cala Massó started boxing in Havana with only one different ladies, spending lengthy hours coaching regardless of being turned away by many coaches and boxing rings. With time, curiosity in boxing amongst ladies has solely grown.

On Monday morning, officers with Cuba’s National Institute for Sports, INDER, introduced in a press convention that they might maintain a contest of 42 ladies boxers in mid-December to decide on 12 athletes for a ladies’s crew.

The crew, they mentioned, will compete within the Central American and Caribbean Games in El Salvador, their first worldwide debut. The competitors might be a primary step towards the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. Women had been first allowed to field within the Olympics in 2012.

Cala Massó, who now trains with 5 different ladies, hopes the choice means their neighborhood will solely develop.

The announcement comes shortly after Cuban boxers made a comeback in May in Mexico, with male boxers competing professionally – and getting paid – for the primary time because the communist authorities prohibited skilled sports activities 60 years in the past. It was an enormous change in a rustic the place athletes, specifically boxers and baseball gamers, recurrently depart for paychecks elsewhere.

Down the road, as soon as the crew is constructed, these ladies might additionally probably compete in knowledgeable capability, INDER officers mentioned.

Meanwhile, they mentioned Cuban ladies boxers will be capable of prepare in state sports activities facilities beginning in January.

Emilia Rebecca Hernández, of INDER, mentioned that the modifications would make it so “Cuban women athletes can move up to the place where they belong – right next to men.”

Yet Hernández, who spoke solely briefly, was the one girl on a panel of male officers who mentioned their delay in permitting ladies to apply the game was as a result of they needed to examine “the risks that women could run.”

Women will put on further padding, they mentioned.

Yet for 22-year-old Giselle Bello Garcia, who boxed alongside Cala Massó after having solely began boxing one 12 months earlier for train, mentioned the information provides them an opportunity to point out what they’re fabricated from.

“I have a new hope for life, because my life has changed. From now on, I’m going to focus solely on boxing,” she mentioned. “I want my whole life, up until my death, to be connected to boxing.”

“I have to be the best,” she added.