World boxing ch’ship: Assam’s Lovelina, Manipur’s Mary Kom enter semifinals

Boxers from Assam Lovlina Borgohain (69kg) and Pwilao Basumatary (64kg) won bronze medals at 70th Strandja Memorial Boxing Tournament at Sofia in Bulgaria on Monday.

Lovlina Borgohain, a gold medallist at the 2018 Indian Open, went down 1-4 to Nien-Chin Chen of Taipei.

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In the quarter-final match of the event, Lovelina defeated Brazil’s Soarez Beatriz 5-0 on Sunday and clinched the first medal for the women boxers of India.

Earlier, Lovlina had bagged a bronze medal at the 2018 AIBA World Women Boxing Championships held in New Delhi.

Lovlina, hails from Golaghat district of Assam. She participated in the 2018 Commonwealth Games welterweight boxing category.

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She also won a bronze at the Asian Boxing Championships in Vietnam in November 2017 and at the President’s Cup held in Astana in June 2017.

Lovlina later won a silver medal at the Ulaanbaatar Cup in Mongolia in June 2018 and a bronze at the 13th International Silesian Championship in Poland in September 2018.

She represented India for the first time at the AIBA Women’s World Boxing Championship, in New Delhi, where she bagged bronze in the Welterweight(69 kg) category on 23 November, 2018.

Pwilao Basumatary lost to Italy’s Valentina Alberti who notched up a commanding 5-0 victory at the Strandja Memorial Boxing tourney .

Pwilao Basumatary made her international debut in was the 2011 World Boxing Championship in Turkey where she won a bronze. She won a gold at the 5th AIBA Nations Cup in Ruma, Serbia.

In 2015, she bagged a bronze at Asian Confederation Women Boxing Championships in Wulanchabu in China. Basumatary is one of the six boxers from the country to win a medal at the tournament in China.

Basumatary hails from a small village in Chirang, Assam.