Barred Cuban champion dreams of 2008 Beijing Games

Barred from the national boxing team after apparently attempting to defect to Germany, star Cuban boxer Guillermo Rigondeaux hasn't thrown in the towel.

The two-time bantamweight Olympic champion is keeping up his training at home, hoping that ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro will forgive him and allow him to compete at the Beijing Games next year.

At stake is the 26-year-old's chances of entering the elite group of just three boxers ever to win three back-to-back Olympic titles: Hungarian Lazlo Papp and Cuban heavyweight fighters Teofilo Stevenson and Felix Savon.

"I run three kilometers every morning, then do exercises and skip with a rope to keep in shape and within my weight category," he told Reuters last week at his small apartment on the south side of Havana.

He spars with youths in the neighborhood and works out at a poorly equipped gym, but has no access to a boxing ring.

Last month during the Pan-American Games in Rio de Janeiro, Rigondeaux and Erislandy Lara, the reigning amateur welterweight world champion, went AWOL for a week.

Brazilian police picked them up on a beach outside Rio after a binge of food, drink and women paid for by German boxing promoters who sought to hire them to box professionally in Europe.

The boxers deny that they tried to defect, claiming at first they had been drugged and abducted, though later they changed their story and said they stayed away from the Games because they had exceeded their weight and feared disqualification.

German visas

Arena Box Promotion of Hamburg said the boxers were waiting for German visas at a secret place when they were arrested. The German consulate in Rio confirmed they had requested visas.

Fidel Castro, who has not appeared in public for a year due to illness, accused the boxers of betraying Cuba for dollars in a newspaper column that blasted US capitalism for stealing the communist-run country's best athletes.

He later wrote that the boxers would not be arrested if they returned to Cuba. The athletes repented and chose not to seek asylum in Brazil; they were deported back to Cuba with their tails between their legs.

Castro quoted press reports that said the two boxers were found at a beach resort in the company of prostitutes.

"They have reached a point of no return as members of a Cuban boxing team," he wrote. "An athlete who abandons his team is like a soldier who abandons his fellow troops in the middle of combat."

Cuba's boxers began training last week without Rigondeaux and Lara for the amateur World Boxing Championships in Chicago in October.

With his career in limbo, "Rigo," as his fans call him, is waiting for instructions from the Cuban authorities.

He dons his gloves every day in the hope of fighting for his country in Beijing. "We never asked for visas for Germany or anywhere else. We just said we wanted to return to Cuba," the boxer said.

"I'm young. I have enough punch to be three-time Olympic champion," he said. "Give me another chance."