The qualifying kickboxing tournament for one ticket to the Road to Las Vegas super tournament will be held on January 5 in Minsk.
Professional kickboxers from Belarus will compete in Minsk for one ticket to the super tournament to be held in Las Vegas (USA, Nevada) in the summer of 2014 at one of the most famous show venues in the world - in the Caesar complex. Representatives of the Belarusian Federation of Kickboxing and Thai Boxing (BFKiTB) and the national team of the country spoke about this at a press conference today, BelTA has learned.
The qualifying tournament in Minsk will be called "The Road to Las Vegas" and will be held on January 5, 2014. Four athletes in the weight category up to 71 kg will fight for the right to represent Belarus in the American ring: Maxim Spodarenko, Evgeny Barkovsky, Dmitry Filonchik and Denis Zuev. They will first conduct preliminary battles (Spodarenko will meet with Barkovsky, and Filonchik with Zuev). Then the winners of the first meetings will compete for the only ticket to Las Vegas.
The senior coach of the national kickboxing and Thai boxing team of Belarus Dmitry Pyasetsky explained that the kickboxing tournament in Las Vegas is one of the most prestigious in the world. “Tournaments in this city are a huge advertisement for kickboxing, which originated in the USA. The International Kickboxing Association (IKA) and the Kickboxing EMPIRE promoter company jointly strive to raise this sport to a new level. As a result of negotiations with those organizations, our country was given the right to hold a qualifying tournament for the competition in Las Vegas, "said Dmitry Pyasetsky. Chairman of the BFKiTB Valery Gaidukevich confirmed that the Belarusian side expressed a desire to join the process initiated by international structures. At the same time, Dmitry Pyasetsky added that negotiations are ongoing to make Minsk a permanent international selection site for tournaments in Las Vegas. According to him, it makes no sense to expect that the next qualifying starts will be similar to the upcoming tournament on January 5. By agreement with the organizers, now only four Belarusians will fight for a trip to the United States. In the future, it is planned that the selections for the prestigious American starts will be held throughout the year and it will not be immediately clear who will eventually perform at them.
As they said at a press conference, at the next professional kickboxing tournament in Las Vegas, which will be held on March 8, 2014, the famous Belarusian athletes Pavel Turuk (81 kg), Denis Goncharonok (91 kg) and Vitaly Gurkov (71 kg). The latter will also hold a title fight in Italy for the title of world champion in his weight, so he does not plan to perform in Minsk in front of his native audience on January 5. Turuk and Goncharonok, on the other hand, intend to enter the ring for the sake of gaining additional experience. As it became known, in addition to qualifying matches for the Minsk tournament, so-called superfights will be held. The opponents of the Belarusians, among whom the audience will see, for example, Alexander Melnikov and Yevgeniy Romankevich, will be opponents from Moldova.
In an interview with BelTA, a participant in the upcoming first tournament in 2014 in Las Vegas, Denis Goncharonok, said that he had studied his upcoming opponent Reduan Cairo from the Netherlands quite well. Their fight will take place in the heavyweight division. The previous meeting of these rivals also took place on the territory of the United States, and the Belarusian turned out to be stronger in a tough fight, eventually winning by knockout. According to Denis Goncharonk, now at the tournament in Las Vegas, the Dutchman wants to take revenge and is intensively preparing for the meeting. The Belarusian athlete himself recently returned from Thailand, where he underwent an important stage of his training. “There were good sparring partners from Australia, the same Thailand, from whom you can learn a lot in technique and tactics. in Thailand Denis Goncharonok.
