The 11-time Canadian boxing champion Mandy Bujold won an appeal at the Court of Arbitration and will participate in the Tokyo Olympics.
Mandy Bujold secured gold at the Canadian qualifier in December 2019 and looked set to compete at her second Olympics, but the final Americas qualifying event earlier this year had to be canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its boxing taskforce said qualification would be decided on three events from 2018 and 2019 when flyweight boing champion Mandy Bujold was on maternity leave.
“Of all the battles I’ve prepared for in my career, I never thought the battle for gender equity would be the hardest”, said Mandy Bujold. “It was one of the biggest fights of my career, but also the fight with the most meaning. I was standing up for what I believe is right and for what I had worked so hard for”, added she.
Mandy Marie Brigitte Bujold is an amateur boxer from Canada. She won gold medals in the women’s flyweight category at the 2011 and 2015 Pan American Games and won a bronze medal at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. She competed at the 2016 Summer Olympics and is scheduled to compete at the delayed 2020 Summer Olympics, following an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
“The IOC Boxing Task Force will consider how to make the accommodations mandated by Cas, while upholding the principle that any sport qualification criteria must be related to objective sporting performance on the field of play” commented from the IOC.
