We are immersed in one of the worst crises that has affected humanity, but before the Coronavirus came into our lives there was not a single week that we did not enjoy boxing on the Internet, on TV or live. We have rarely been deprived of enjoying the sport we love, yes, the sport of flat noses and cauliflower ears. Covid-19 has not only taken from society the opportunity to have a normal life, but it has also put us against the ropes, and it has begun to knock us down and we are not sure if we will be able to beat the protection count.

Before the virus spread around the world, thousands and thousands of fights took place uninterruptedly in the last decades and there was not a single day without boxing. Today, 13 days have passed without listening to the toll of the bell. The last events recorded by Boxrec were on March 15th in South Africa and Germany.

This is a pandemic that most of this or the previous generations had not seen, because the last pandemic that attacked us was the Spanish Flu between 1918-1919 and about 500 million people, a quarter of the world’s population, were infected, with an estimated 20 to 50 million people dying. Unlike the Covid-19, that pandemic attacked people between the ages of 20 and 40, while today’s virus does not respect ages, attacking from babies to the elderly.

The whole world is suffering from the ravages of Covid-19, which does not respect age, color or creed and the boxing family does not escape from this, such as former U.S. boxers Derrick Jefferson and Travis Kauffman, as well as some members of the Turkish and Croatian Olympic boxing teams, who tested positive for the virus and today are fighting to knock it out.

Unfortunately, American journalist Ron Ross lost the battle against the virus, as well as the Puerto Rican trainer and cutman Nelson Cuevas, being the first two boxing victims to be killed by it.

I am sure that with time, and taking the proper health, safety and quarantine precautions, things will get better because there are many heroes fighting to counteract the crisis and to find the cure for COVID-19.

For now we must be satisfied with social distancing (using social media and alternate greetings), like when the referee sends each boxer to his corner, but with the guard always up, because this crisis will pass and it will be our turn to continue fighting when the bell rings again.