FOR a brief moment Cuba’s former world champion Erislandy Lara was the first boxer to resign from the WBC’s Clean Boxing programme, an anti-doping regimen administered with VADA (the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association).
In a statement the WBC said that after taking himself out of their drug testing programme Lara, a former WBA super-welterweight world titlist who had boxed Canelo Alvarez in 2014, would be removed from their world ratings. Lara had been ranked at number two.
But Mauricio Sulaiman, the President of the WBC, told Boxing News that the situation has been resolved, and Lara is now back in the rankings.
“I believe it was a misunderstanding, the letter that they wrote, it was miswritten. The letter itself says ‘please unenroll Lara’. That [to me] means take him out of the Clean Boxing programme. What they were trying to say, as per my telephone conversation with Luis De Cubas his manager, is that Lara is fighting for the WBA title so he no longer needs to be in the ratings because he’s fighting for another title, but he mixed it with enrolment of the Clean Boxing programme. It was, I believe, a mistake but now it’s been cleared. He continues in the Clean Boxing programme and everything is corrected,” Sulaiman said.
