Mr. Waheedullah Hameedi – We are working on Afghanistan’s better image in boxing

Mr. Waheedullah Hameedi is Afghanistan’s boxing official who arrived to Bangkok in the first competition day to visit the ASBC Asian Confederation Youth Boxing Championships in Bangkok. The International Director of the Afghanistan Boxing Federation had negotiations also with the ASBC management and the Thai LOC. Afghanistan is planning to re-join fully to the Asian boxing map and Mr. Hameedi shared with us his thoughts, difficulties, strategic plans in Afghanistan.
“It is amazing we are here in the ASBC Asian Confederation Youth Boxing Championships in Bangkok to develop the image of the Afghanistan Boxing Federation.
We have to build up our National Federation to be a professional organization as first step to our long road to be competitive in the future. We are negotiating with Thailand about the Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate in the future.
We are planning to discuss similar cooperation and coordination with several other countries in our region. Uzbekistan, India, and Iran are easy to reach for us from Afghanistan therefore cooperation with them hopefully will be successful in the near future.
Secondly we have to return to our basic elements in Afghanistan and develop our schoolboys and junior boxers. We will come back to the international elite level even stronger after our strategic plans were shown their first positive signs.
We are planning to start a discussion with our neighbouring countries to set up a South Asian Boxing Federation to support each other in the region and held common training camps and competitions. Our idea is a South Asian Boxing Championships every year in the region and hopefully all of the other countries will be found our initiative as a good one.
Currently we are collecting all details about our boxers, clubs and making a new database to know well all of our possibilities within the country. We have got boxing life in all of the 24 regions in Afghanistan. To be honest we have got at least 150 boxing clubs only in Kabul while we know our further strong regions are in Mazari Sharif, Herat, Kandahar and Kunduz.
We had national events for our junior boxers in 2017 as last competition and hopefully we can host more competitions this year. We knew there are several Afghan boxers who have been training abroad of the country. We are following the performance of the Afghan boxers in Germany, in Denmark, in Norway and in a few other countries as well.
Afghanistan formed its women’s boxing squad in 2007 and hopefully we will be able to join to ASBC Asian Confederation Women’s Boxing Championships to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in November.
We have to show ourselves in the upcoming events but our strength currently is not enough to get medals in the main international events. We have got AIBA certified coaches in Afghanistan and we are planning to host courses also to educate our coaches. To be honest currently we are facing with difficulties in the Refereeing & Judging part of the sport,” said Mr. Waheedullah Hameedi in Bangkok.