E-Paper
Why a 17-year wait continues in men’s boxing
Indian boxing faces challenges as former coach Santiago Nieva returns, camps show reduced athlete performance, raising questions on training methods.
Several things happened around Indian boxing recently: Santiago Nieva, its former high-performance director (2017-2022) returned as women’s coach, the senior nationals were rescheduled within nine hours of being announced and more personally, a document with a startling independent test result around some elite men showed up on email.
Nieva’s first statement was around wanting Indian boxers going “beyond a solitary bronze at the Olympics.” The single Olympic boxing bronze stings the men more than the women. Since Vijender Singh in Beijing 2008, no Indian man has won an Olympic boxing medal across 17 years and four Games and Amit Panghal’s 2019 World Championship silver remains India’s only significant global medal from a male boxer. The combat sport ready for take-off in 2008 is now a distant cousin to wrestling. There are many reasons for this paucity but the test result document points to one and raises a question.
The document provided results of a study undertaken on several elite boxers who returned from long, national camps with their physical, competitive capacity diminished rather than enhanced. Tests done on a few elite boxers showed that their VO2 max (aerobic capacity) reduced after attending lengthy camps around big competitions - in one case down by 8.7%. This meant that the male boxers tested had entered big competitions (the raison d’etre of camps) functioning on less lung power than when they first entered the camp weeks prior.
We’ll understand VO₂max later but first, to camps. Boxers from states, institutions, academies, armed forces are chosen from feeder competition performances for national camps in NIS, Patiala. Between four and six boxers each in men’s and women’s across 10 Olympic and non-Olympic weight categories — minimum 40 men, 40 women — are now in contention to represent India at major events.
Let’s stick to the men. In 2025, the Boxing Federation of India (BFI) said in an email reply to my queries, there were four camps for the elite men lasting 21, 62, 50 and 45 days, a total of 178 days. This general rostering of athletes for months, particularly in individual sport may have made sense until the 1990s pre-professionalisation and the advancement of sport science. Today it appears out of date. Even if the idea is borrowed from the China model, it is not producing Chinese-level results. The BFI however, said, “centralised elite high-performance training structure remains the most effective approach at this stage.” The practice, the BFI said, was “followed by most of the boxing nations across the globe,” and allowed coaches and sports science / medical staff, “to work in integrated manner, which is far more efficient than dispersing resources across multiple locations.”
This policy was “anchored in a systematic evaluation and preparation framework.” The reason for long duration camps was explained thus: “7-10” days for assessment and “comprehensive evaluation” followed by “an additional 15–20 days of focused training, recovery planning, and performance monitoring” before a big competition. That is anything between 22 and 30 days – so why 62, 50 and 45? And the diminished post-camp VO2 max numbers of four elite boxers?
The VO2 max test assesses the respiratory system’s capacity to perform when under maximum strain and can be trained into an elevated state. In boxers, higher VO2 max helps them recover quickly between rounds, neutralises lactic acid, delays fatigue and ensures that in their final rounds during bouts, they return with greater energy and focus. For our male boxers to go from camp to competition with their aerobic resources depleted is self-defeating. Conversations around the boxing community say that coaches from other countries have a simple plan against Indian men — keep them on their toes for one or two rounds and take them out in round three, because they’ll run out of gas.
The BFI lists in their support staff, 18 coaches, 8 physios, two strength and conditioning coaches, two doctors, six masseurs, two nutritionists and one video analyst, divided equally amongst men and women. Halve those numbers and spread them across a minimum of 40 boxers and see what that looks like. According to Col. Arun Malik, BFI Executive Director the federation had “scientific means through which we… track their progress. The data is available with us which gives us the graph of an athlete… And I don’t think that that data says that the athlete came in a much better shape… I don’t know where this input (of reduced physical capacity) is coming from.”
Malik made reverse references to boxers returning to camp “completely out of shape” having put “on five or six kgs.” There not being “that level of maturity where we can say okay, decentralise the camp.” Boxers he said, returned to varied home institutions (which also carry out independent tests) where, “everybody is training under a different school of thought.”
Had India’s worlds and Olympics medals from its men kept ticking over regularly, there would have been no need to question camps. But it hasn’t and unlike in the past, there are now alternative paths to high-performance coaching methods which focus on individual attention over collective drill. And which reveal alarming VO2 max post-camp results.
Malik was asked if it were scientifically proved that the camps in fact affected the physical readiness of boxers heading to competition, would the BFI look to change its policy? He said, “it’s not that we are digging in our heels… my way or the highway. Absolutely not. We are here to grow the sport. We are here to get the results. Yes. If there is a better way to achieve the… (medals) in 2028, yes. Absolutely. With full heart, we will, we will follow that.” He said, “We (BFI) are just a means, you know. We are the synergizing agency.”
The BFI currently has no high-performance director. Reaching out to other fellow travellers and going down a road not taken so far, may now be their next best step.
