The gong always sounds at the end of three-minute rounds, the punch bags still swing to the rhythm of jabs and uppercuts. However, at the Garges-lès-Gonesse boxing club, in the Parisian suburbs, few athletes can train in this Covid-19 winter.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the practice of indoor sport has again been prohibited since mid-January in France. However, in working-class towns, this closure of sports facilities has devastating consequences on the social link, are alarmed local elected officials who are organizing a summit on this subject on Monday.
“Sport in our neighborhoods is a republican cement, and already in difficulty yesterday. With the health crisis, it comes to give them a hammer blow”, laments Benoit Jimenez, UDI mayor of Garges-lès-Gonesse (Val-d’Oise ). “The kids are out there, they don’t know what the fuck, so they’re messing around with the police. That’s been sport for two weeks.”
One weekday evening at the Boxing Club in his underprivileged city, only a dozen professional or high-level boxers – who benefit from a ministerial exemption – were allowed to put on gloves for training. The blows clack, the movements of the legs make the soles squeal on the PVC floor of the gymnasium.
With 250 licensees in years outside Covid-19, the club has already lost 40% this season. Its managers even hesitate to cash the contribution checks signed at the start of the September school year, given the impossibility for members to practice. A blow for this structure which has hatched several French amateur boxing champions.
“Our fear is to tell ourselves that everything we have built in more than 20 years, we must rebuild it: the relationship of trust with parents, the relationship of trust with young people …”, confides Khalid Zaouche, President of the Boxing Club since 2000. “We have a lot of calls from parents to ask us when it starts again, there is a real impatience.”
With the sudden and prolonged cessation of training, the managers of the association know that they will hardly recover some young people. Or will never find them in the ring again.
– Round Decisive –
These long interruptions have demotivated even some of the most promising elements. One of the club’s teenagers, who started boxing at the age of 6, refused to respond to the call of the junior French team: “the six months destroyed her, she didn’t can no longer train as before, “says Emmanuel Dos Santos, the coach.
Without being able to go to the gym, Bengoro Bamba spent the first confinement to train alone in his dusty underground parking lot. The 26-year-old super-middleweight boxer had barely turned pro when the pandemic hit. He hasn’t fought for almost a year.
Originally from the 19th arrondissement of Paris, he knows what he owes to sports. “If I hadn’t had boxing, I think I would have ended up a bit badly because at a young age, I was very brawler, he testifies. Boxing channeled me and has made me a different person. I quit hanging out in the neighborhood, quit hanging out with certain people. “
Sportsmen, associations and mayors launched this fall several SOS in the press, calling to save a sporting world “on the edge of the abyss” in the working-class districts. The difficulties encountered in these communities generally predate, but are amplified by the health crisis.
Sensitive urban areas in particular have nearly half as much sports facilities in proportion as the French average, according to a 2014 report from the Ministry of the City, Youth and Sports. “All my sports equipment is full, from Saturday to Sunday, there is no longer a single slot,” confirms Mayor Benoit Jimenez.
The mobilization movement he is leading continues with the holding on Monday in Garges-lès-Gonesse of a “Grenelle for education and inclusion through sport”, at the end of which the collective of local elected officials will present ten proposals to the government to “save” sport.
At the Boxing Club, the direct unhooked by the coronavirus staggered but we do not yet admit KO September, in two seasons it’s over. “
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