Indian boxing champion and a sportsperson from Guwahati, Assam, Shiva Thapa, secured at least a bronze medal at the Asian Boxing Championship 2022 with a 4-1 victory over South Korean boxer Minsu Choi in the 63.5-kilogram category quarter-finals in Amman, Jordan, on Sunday, November 6, 2022.
The Olympian of London 2012 and an Asian Champion of 2013, Shiva Thapa has a chance to fetch himself a sixth medal at the Asian Championships with this upcoming semi-final making him the first male boxer in the history of the continental meet to achieve this feat. With this, he has successfully surpassed Kazakhstan’s Vassiliy Levit, an Olympic silver medal winner, two-time world bronze medalist, and the only male boxer with five Asian Championship medals.
Indian female boxers MC Mary Kom (7) and L Sarita Devi (8) have more Asian medals than Thapa, with the latter having won six consecutive titles, five of which were gold, at the pinnacle of her career.
Shiva Thapa was born on December 8, 1993, to Padam Thapa, an Indian Gorkha, in Guwahati, Assam. Shiva’s elder brother, Gobind Thapa, was also a state-level medal-winning boxer, who inspired Shiva to join boxing. He began his professional boxing career in 2008 at the Children’s Asia International Sports Games held in Yakutsk, Russia, where he won a bronze in his category.
On August 28, 2016, he was awarded the Arjuna Award by then-President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi.
Shiva Thapa, who won silver medals in 2017 and 2021 and bronze in 2015 and 2019, will be facing 2019 gold medalist Bakhodur Usmonov of Tajikistan in the semi-final on Friday.
