By Aadi Nair
PARIS (Reuters) – Defending super heavyweight champion Bakhodir Jalolov was drawn in the same quarter as Australian Teremoana Junior after the draws for the boxing tournament at the Paris Olympics were made at the North Paris Arena on Thursday.
Uzbekistan’s Jalolov, who is also the 2023 World and 2022 Asian Games champion, beat Teremoana en route to the gold medal at the World Championship in Tashkent last year.
The pair are set to renew their rivalry in the quarter-finals, which Teremoana has said he is intent on winning.
“If anyone’s going to be worried, it’ll be him, not me,” Teremoana told reporters on Wednesday.
Another promising name in the category is Britain’s Delicious Orie, who will be taking on Armenian Davit Chaloyan – the 2021 world silver medallist – in the preliminaries.
Julio Cesar La Cruz, champion in light heavyweight in the 2016 Rio Games and in heavyweight five years later in Tokyo, begins his quest for a third gold medal against Loren Alfonso of Azerbaijan. The Cuban will be competing in the heavyweight category.
Rio Olympics light flyweight gold medallist Hasanboy Dusmatov meets Puerto Rico’s Juanma Lopez in the second round of the flyweight category.
In the women’s draw, defending women’s lightweight champion Kellie Harrington begins with a bye. The Irish boxer is in the same half of the draw as Brazil’s Pan American Games champion Beatriz Ferreira, who she beat in the Tokyo Olympics final.
Elsewhere, welterweight boxer Busenaz Surmeneli, who clinched Turkey’s first-ever boxing gold in Tokyo, could meet world championships silver medallist Imane Khelif of Algeria in the semi-final.
Two boxers were removed from draw, with Ethiopia’s Fikremariam Yadesa Leta ineligible after failing to provide proper documentation, while Tugrulhan Erdemir was replaced by German Magomed Schachidov after the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the Turkish boxer’s provisional doping suspension.
(Reporting by Aadi Nair in Paris, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
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