When Dalis Gures arrived as a teenager in Vancouver with his single mother and four siblings in 2016 — via a refugee camp in Kenya — the Canadian-Ethiopian athlete had played soccer but never considered boxing.
His life changed after he got into trouble for a fistfight in high school.
“I was getting picked on by kids older than me,” Gures told CBC News in an interview. “One kid was saying racism and the N-word … and one day, I’d just had enough and snapped.”
Both students involved were suspended, Gures serving his suspension in school. Later, a physical education teacher suggested he try a free youth drop-in program at Eastside Boxing Club.
“I started beginning the journey of boxing,” he recalled, as he trained Monday in a downtown park with fellow boxers. “It gave me a passion and something I would wake up for in the morning. Boxing just helped my life and changed my life completely.”
Just four years after learning the combat sport, the 20-year-old has risen to become B.C.’s top featherweight boxer, which includes athletes weighing 57-63.5 kilograms. He has won the provincial championships three times in his class.
WATCH | B.C. boxing champion Dalis Gures sparring and talking about his journey:
B.C.’s top featherweight boxer, Dalis Gures, speaks to CBC News during a recent Vancouver training session about why he started boxing just four years ago after arriving in Canada as a refugee from Ethiopia. Now, the 20-year-old, considered a rising star in the sport, needs to raise his own funding for high-performance athletic training in Montreal.
For the past year, Gures has set his sights on representing Canada on its Olympics boxing team. Boxing Canada is holding a qualifying competition in December in Montreal.
Gures came a close second place in the most recent qualifying event earlier this year.
“This is my dream, and I want to accomplish my dreams,” he told CBC News.
‘A significant hurdle’
According to Boxing Canada’s high-performance director, Kraig Devlin, Gures stands a real chance of soon representing his new country — last year becoming a citizen — on the international stage.
Because he does not yet have one of Boxing Canada’s eight “cards” — the term for slots Sports Canada reserves for funding the country’s top-tier athletes in various Olympic categories — he does not yet get access to federal sports dollars.
“If you’re not carded … in most cases, the athletes are left to fundraise for themselves,” Devlin explained, “or spend their own money in order to pursue the training and competition opportunities.”
So that has led Gures to try to raise $15,000 in funds to focus full-time on higher-level training. So far, he’s garnered nearly $1,000 of that toward moving to train to Montreal, which hosts the country’s national team training headquarters.
As he put it in his campaign on the fundraising platform, Make A Champ, financial constraints have become “a significant hurdle” on his path to the global ring.
‘This kid was not going to quit’
Shoyan Wright remembers the first day Gures walked into Eastside Boxing Club, where Wright coached the youth drop-in.
The gym had been contacted by Gures’ high school teacher and was expecting him.
“I just remember a kid with a big Afro,” Wright said. “And you can just tell he was a little bit angry.
“But he was hungry … this kid was not going to quit.”
There, Gures learned discipline, patience and a commitment to training and living healthier, he recalled. He was forced to wait and learn before sparring with others.
Wright watched the aspiring athlete go from loss to loss in his first competitions, however. Such setbacks early in a career are demoralizing at best; some consider quitting, he said.
“When he lost his first two fights … he was like, ‘What do you think I should do?'” Wright said about one discouraged phone call from Gures.
“‘It’s up to you. You could quit and always wonder — or you keep on going,'” he recalled telling Gures at the time. “I’ve been lucky to be a witness to all the work he’s put in,” Wright added.
WATCH | Gures loses to Quebec’s Victor Tremblay in the 2023 Pan Am Games qualifier competition:
‘A very short space of time’
One of his current coaches, independent trainer Tariq Abdulrahman, saw his earliest fights, too.
“I actually remember watching his first fight,” he recalled. “I thought it was something quite special. He stood out.”
Abdulrahman said the two got together after the fight and had “an immediate connection,” both in boxing ethos and “cultural similarities” as fellow immigrants and Muslims.
“To see his rise from his first fight all the way up to becoming provincial champion … and being ranked one of the top athletes in his weight class in Canada in a very short space of time is definitely kudos to his natural ability, his zest, and his love for the sport,” Abdulrahman said while coaching Gures on Monday.
He’s also currently studying under Mendoza Boxing Club founder and head coach Oneal Mendoza, who called Gures a “raw natural talent” and “tremendously athletic and also a great IQ.”
Mendoza and other fellow fighters are organizing a boxing event to help Gures’ fundraising efforts, which is not unusual for emerging champions.
“These athletes and fighters are coming from the bottom or from scratch,” Mendoza said. “They’re really young and need a lot of guidance. Funds are always a big thing too … so we always try to do our part to help these athletes show their full potential.”
For Gures, every defeat in the ring — most recently to Canada’s number-one featherweight boxer in June
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