KO a las Drogas: 30 years encouraging youth through boxing

This Friday, when the bell rings for the first bout of the event to be staged at the Casino Buenos Aires in the Argentine capital, the World Boxing Association will begin celebrating the 30th anniversary of its flagship program, the KO Drugs International Boxing Festival, which has provided so many opportunities for emerging boxing talent around the world. 

It was born as an initiative to guide young people towards a life guided by the healthy values of sport and away from one of the worst scourges of society. Later, it became a social responsibility program based on sports, which has become a window for boxers from so many countries and support for social initiatives in its host cities. 

Two of the most dazzling figures to emerge in the 30-year history of KO Drugs were undoubtedly Gennadi Golovkin and Jorge Linares, who later catapulted to the pinnacle of world boxing. Great boxers such as Rosendo Alvarez, Hector “Macho” Camacho, Kina Malpartida, Luis “Nica” Concepcion, Celestino “Pelenchin” Caballero, Ricardo Mayorga and others also fought there. Like them, dozens of men and women wrote their own chapters of success under the program. 

The idea of a great man

Don Gilberto Mendoza gave birth to the idea of creating a campaign aimed at fighting the scourge of drugs through the practice of sports. Thus, 1991 saw the birth of the WBA KO Drugs World Campaign, which became a tangible reality with the first edition, in the Aragua state of Venezuela, of the KO Drugs Campaign Children’s Sports Games, in which more than 200 boys, girls and adolescents participated in disciplines other than boxing, such as volleyball, athletics, rubber ball -today baseball – and soccer. 

A couple of years later, also in Venezuela, the program, which had already reached the third edition of its games, incorporated professional boxing, celebrating the first Latin American Boxing Festival. It was the birth of KO Drugs. 

From then on, countless young boxers found a platform to show their talent to the world, and the event promoted by the WBA was a meeting point for the boxing and sports family, a big house that also received monumental personalities of the sport such as Mike Tyson, Roberto “Manos de Piedra” Durán, Félix Tito Trinidad, Oscar De La Hoya, and Antonio Cervantes “Kid Pambelé”, Bernard Hopkins, Evander Holyfield, Aaron Pryor, Alexis Arguello, Naseem Hamed, Virgil Hill, Don King and baseball Hall of Famer Luis Aparicio, among many others.

This weekend, at the Casino Buenos Aires in Argentina, a new chapter will be written in the history of the KO Drugs, the third to be held in the southern country.