He collapsed. In the ninth round, Colombian boxer Eléider Álvarez was knocked down by Joe Smith Jr. and lost by knockout. This defeat made the national fighter make the decision to retire from boxing. The Colombian loses his second fight and the opportunity to contest the light heavyweight world title.
This is his story
We are going to summarize the first part of this story told 12 years ago, on May 4, 2008, in these same pages of TIME, in a profile titled ‘Mom’s Boxer’. In 1994, with Eléider 10 years old (he was born on April 8, 1984), the Álvarez Baytar family – made up of his father, Jorge; Aída, Eléider and two sisters, Vilma and Deysi– left Puerto Girón, in the district of Apartadó, Antioquia, to Turbo, on the seashore, also in Antioquia.
They settled in a house across from Oswaldo Ricard, Boxing coach. The boy’s little attachment to studying (“three times I did the eleventh year,” he said on Sunday with laughter) and that neighborhood led Aida to force him to be a boxer. TO Eléider he did not like it. He did not fight in the street, although he did fight there, the only one his mother saw, with her permission with just one look.
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He wanted to be a Vallenato singer. And with his friends from the San Martín neighborhood they formed a group called Infancia Vallenata, which later changed its name to Binomio de Oro de Turbo. They appeared on weekends in exchange for some coins, with Eléider singing or playing the guacharaca. But once, in 1997, at the Vallenato de Turbo Festival, she forgot the second stanza of the song ‘Sleep with me tonight’ and decided to leave music. So in 1998, she settled on what her mother wanted: to practice b.
She died on January 9, 1999 from a stroke. He wanted to honor her memory by being someone in boxing, because also in the town it was said that without her presence, he would surely take the path of vice. Since then she dreamed of becoming a world champion, as. Miguel ‘Happy’ Lora.
Quick, that 1999, he came to the Antioquia team being polished by Abelardo Parra, the same coach of the medalist Olympic Yuberjen Martinez. I argued with Parra every day. “He was lazy and had no confidence,” his teammate, best friend and compadre, José ‘Diablito’ Mosquera, once told this newspaper, who knocked him out in two rounds in Carepa.
However, since 2005 he entered boxing fully and seriously. He won gold at the Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2007, knocking out Cuban Yusiel Napoles, with a badly operated right hand, as he has always maintained, which only allows him to hit with two knuckles. But he was in debt to his mother when he was eliminated from the Beijing Olympics 2008.
New life in Canada
He decided to go professional, like his colleagues Darley perez and ‘Momo’ Romero, both later world champions. And the best offer came from Canada, where he went in the company of another member of the Beijing team, the valluno super heavyweight Óscar Rivas. And he settled in Montreal, under the technical direction of Marc Ramsey; your agent, Stephane Lepine; and promoter Yvon Michel.
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There he made his first three professional fights, in 2009. But he had to return to Colombia at the end of that year due to a visa problem. He stayed in Turbo, where his only daughter, Aída Elisa (a name to honor her mother), was born today, 9 years old. 2010 was lost: not a single fight. There was despair, but the images of his mother, always in difficult moments, calmed him. He only fixed the problem in 2011, and he returned to Montreal and got back in the ring.
Since the end of 2015 he is the first challenger to the light heavyweight title of the World Boxing Council, and since then Adonis Stevenson, the WBC champion, dodges it. On the way he leaves former world champions. The Romanian-Canadian Lucian Bute predicts that he will be the fourth Colombian victim, after Alejandro Berrío, Édinson Miranda and Fulgencio Zúñiga. “I killed him,” says Eléider, who knocked him out in the fight prior to the starter. Even when, this year, the confrontation with the most solid and reputed of the light heavyweight champions, the Russian Sergey Kovalev.
Then he decides to do part of the preparation in Bogotá, in the El Salitre gym, with the collaboration of the former boxer. Alexander Brand. The 2018 World Cup in Russia is in full swing. He goes unnoticed, as is almost always the case with those who are not footballers. Share with boys from the Colombian Boxing team preparing for the Central American and Caribbean Games in Barranquilla. “It was three weeks of demanding preparation at altitude. And it worked, ”he says now.
“That is an ‘animal.’ They had confidence. He told me that he was going to make history as the world champion of more weight in Colombia, and he fulfilled it with that triumph on Saturday ”, assured in an interview with this newspaper the Olympic runner-up Rio de Janeiro, Yuberjen Martinez, his friend, with whom he shared during the rest trips in those three weeks in Bogotá.
Today Eléider decided to hang up his gloves, once he lost to Joe Smith. His legacy will continue and he will always be a benchmark in Colombian boxing.
Estewil Quesada Fernandez
Caribbean Regional Editor of EL TIEMPO
BARRANQUILLA
In Twitter: @EstewilQ
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