Three decades of empowering youth through boxing – World Boxing Association

The International Boxing Festival KO Drugs returns to Argentina this week and it is inevitable to review the history of this flagship program of the World Boxing Association. Three decades of hard work, of effort of the boxing family in different countries that, as it will happen once again in Buenos Aires, come together to promote youth with a clear message in favour of the sport. 

Created as an initiative to steer young people towards a life guided by the healthy values of sport and away from one of the worst scourges of society, the KO Drugs Festival has become a sports-based social responsibility program, which has become a showcase for boxers from so many countries and support for social initiatives in the cities that have served as its headquarters. 

Two of the most dazzling figures in the 31-year history of the KO Drugs were undoubtedly Gennadi Golovkin and Jorge Linares, who later catapulted to the top of the world boxing scene. Fighters of the stature of Rosendo Álvarez, Héctor ‘Macho’ Camacho, Kina Malpartida, Luis ‘Nica’ Concepción, Celestino ‘Pelenchin’ Caballero, Ricardo Mayorga, Mayerlin Rivas, Clara Lescurat, Carlos Cañizales and others also competed there. Like them, dozens of men and women wrote their own chapters of success under the program. 

A great man’s idea

It was from the mind of Don Gilberto Mendoza that the idea of creating a campaign to fight the scourge of drugs through sport was born. Thus was born the KO Drugs World Campaign, which in 1991 became a tangible reality with the first KO Drugs Campaign Children’s Sports Games in the state of Aragua, Venezuela where more than 200 children and adolescents participated in non-boxing disciplines such as volleyball, athletics, rubber ball – today baseball 5-a-side – and football. 

A couple of years later, also in Venezuela, in the third edition of its games, professional boxing was incorporated, celebrating the first Latin American Boxing Festival. The KO Drugs was born. 

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 sporting family, a big house that also received great boxing personalities such as Mike Tyson, Roberto ‘Manos de Piedra’ Durán, Felix Tito Trinidad, Oscar De La Hoya, and Antonio Cervantes ‘Kid Pambele’, 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 August 23 and 24, at the Casino Buenos Aires in the Republic of Argentina, a new chapter in the history of the KO Drugs, the third in a row to be held in the southern country, will be written.