We are just a week away from the seminal sporting event of the term: Town versus Gown. On Wednesday of Third Week, the Oxford University Amateur Boxing Club (OUABC) takes on the best of Oxford town in the debating chamber of the Oxford Union.
For the OUABC boxers, the event is crucial, providing valuable insight into the shape of the squad as the run-up to the club’s encounter with Cambridge intensifies. So far, Matt McFahn (Captain,) Tom Eliasz, Tom Scott, Theo Cox, Daniel Kibbey and Noah Viner have all confirmed bouts for next week.
Once Town V Gown is out of the way, OUABC will turn its attention to greater challenges: BUCS and Varsity. The BUCS campaign begins on 6th February with the first of the club’s league bouts, which are an equally important opportunity for the University’s boxers.
Tim Notke, an American high school basketball coach, once said that “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” Luckily for OUABC, with external competition round the corner, it seems talent and hard work is present in equal measure. With four gym sessions and four morning workouts a week, the Oxford boxers are arguably one of the University’s most dedicated outfits. The gruelling January training camp in Tenerife is testament to that. Such is the confidence in the OUABC ranks that men’s captain Matt McFahn has set out the aim to “not only win Varsity, but do so clearly”.
Preparations for this term’s season-defining bouts stretched back well before Christmas. Whilst BUCS and Varsity are undoubtedly the highlights of Hilary term for the club, Michaelmas was not without competitive action. In October, the OUABC President Claudia Havranek and women’s captain Mariya Lazarova attended the England Novice Boxing Championships, with both women performing well before suffering closely-fought quarter-final defeats to seasoned Army opposition. Even more impressively, McFahn reaped the rewards of his early season fitness work, coming out on top in the Home Counties Under 20 category and securing himself a national bronze, just falling short against the competition’s eventual champion.
2015 was a year in which enormous strides were made in women’s boxing at Oxford. The current OUABC women’s squad is the largest ever and there will be high hopes for accolades on both sides of the club this year. Hitting punch bags with Herculean might while being as light as a butterfly on one’s toes is not just the prerogative of OUABC’s muscly male stars. The women of Iffley’s boxing gym are equally as adept at fighting in the quadrilateral ring. In fact OUABC has a team of six highly trained female boxers who take to the ring in dark blue in many competitions including, in 2015, being the sole female-only team in BUCS.
Of course, despite a packed early-term schedule, it is Varsity that looms large on the Hilary fixture list. The club secretary, James Kerr, summed up the emotions of the whole squad when he set out his desperation to “retake the Truelove Bowl from Cambridge in front of a home crowd”.
With a strong number of spectators set to descend upon the Town Hall, the event is sure to be as fiercely supported as it is contested. If OUABC can cap off an already promising season with BUCS, Town V Gown and Varsity success, it will be an achievement that is both impressive and wholly deserved
