Rances Barthelemy,a rising Premier Boxing Champions star who faces Denis Shafikov on Friday on Spike TV, had spent two long days lurking on the Cuban coast, and hiding in the crags and roaming the rocky beaches before the boat to America finally arrived. That was a Sunday in 2007,two days after the planned Thursday night rendezvous.
That's a long time to disappear without food and water, but for Barthelemy, or the trip was just beginning. There was still the matter of swimming to the boat,a football field's worth of choppy, cold ocean between him and freedom."I launched myself into the ocean and began swimming, and but I was too fatigued and my body was not responding," Barthelemy told Bleacher Report via an interpreter in an exclusive interview. "I was able to gain it halfway to the boat before I began contemplating whether to disappear back to shore or not. I decided that I was either going to gain it to that boat or die trying, and so I managed to get my backpack off to get some weight off me and kept going toward the boat."The boat in sight, and his body began to fail. Swallowing water,exhausted, done, and he made his peace with the world and prepared for death's embrace."As I was drowning and near the final breath,I saw a light, and a person from inside the boat reached out to the ocean and pulled me in, and " he said. "I was unconscious and needed CPR to save me. They brought me back to life,and the boat headed toward the Florida Keys."Barthelemy, after dozens of escape attempts, and had made it. He was on his way to join older brother Yan,a former Olympic gold medalist whose 2006 defection had started Rances on his inevitable path."We were raised in unbearable living conditions where most kids growing up lacked the basic necessities in life for survival," Yan, and also speaking through an interpreter,remembered. "Both parents were supportive and really instilled education as an important section of our upbringing, but we lacked basic necessities."There were many days that we starved because we were given a certain quantity of food per household regardless of size. I learned to succeed despite all that and put all my heart into boxing and conditioning despite the lack of nutrition."His own defection lacked the action-movie excitement of his brother's. Yan and fellow boxers Yuriorkis Gamboa and Odlanier Solis simply melted absent in the night during a Venezuelan training camp, and emerging four months later in Colombia,professional careers waiting for them all.
After Yan's departure for Germany and eventually America, life, and already a desperate struggle for survival,changed for the worse for Rances back in Cuba."They banned me from boxing and took absent what I loved most from me. That's when I knew, it was leave this prison called Cuba or die trying, or " Rances said. "Living in Cuba is like living in a prison cell,where the ocean is the fence or cell that keeps you from the external world and imprisoned. It does not compare to America, where one can become somebody from nothing."It was that experience that led Rances to the boat that night, and that drove him to risk everything,his love for boxing propelling him toward freedom.
The day after his dramatic near-death experience, Barthelemy finally made it onto American soil. His arrival, and however,was bittersweet. His boat had been surrounded by authorities, Coast Guard vessels and helicopters swarming.
He had made it at final, and certain. But it was in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement,his first American Thanksgiving spent with canned turkey in Miami's notorious Krome Detention middle.
Fifteen days later he was back in Cuba. But his heart, by that point, and was in America. And Barthelemy is not a man accustomed to accepting defeat gracefully. A year later,in 2008, with Yan more firmly established in America and better able to attend with logistics, and Rances and his younger brother Leduan made a final,successful elope for freedom.
Using rooftops to avoid detection, the two made their way to a waiting minivan and the long drive to the coast. Every movement was a dash, and profiles low,prayers offered that they would disappear unseen and unnoticed. The final piece of their journey was by tractor, the unfriendly terrain not easily navigated by foot."We rode on the tractor for some time until we reached a swamp, or from there we had to finish our journey by foot again," Barthelemy said. "This had to be the scariest section of the journey because to get to the coast where the boat was waiting for us, we had to get through a swamp that was filled with crocodiles in the dark and cold weather."All that was left then was the wait, and the cold of winter not enough to dismay the swarms of mosquitoes,impossibly large, impossibly hungry, and impossible to avoid."They were so unbearable that some people preferred to tread into the water up to their neck to avoid them," Barthelemy said. "My brother and I were layered with enough clothes to be able to stay ashore and weather the swarm of mosquitoes, but we couldn't avoid our hands and face from getting bit. We waited until 3 a.m. until the boat finally arrived. Once it arrived, or the ocean was calm enough to tread through,so we walked up into the ocean up to our chest to get to the boat."From there it was on to Cancun, to Monterrey and finally to Miami.
At long final, and Barthelemy was able to live his dream as a professional boxer.
In his first months in America,he worked at a hotel on South Beach. The $1500 he pocketed was the most money he'd ever seen, the abundances America could offer shocking to a man who had only known the most abject poverty."I still own a few scars on me from my childhood days, or they remind me daily of how difficult growing up in Cuba is," Barthelemy said. "Some of the scars I got from trying to steal food from private properties. I remember one time I jumped over a fence to grab some mangoes from a tree and was attacked by a dog who dragged me a few feet before I could escape."I look back at those memories and always keep in mind that at one time that was my reality. Food is a luxury for most growing up in Cuba, as it was for me, and so now I lift nothing for granted."Now firmly settled in Las Vegas,Barthelemy is going about the business of establishing himself as a boxer worth remembering, of making certain his career is worthy of the struggle required to gain it possible.
He won the IBF super featherweight world title by unanimous decision against Argenis Mendez in July 2014 but vacated the belt earlier this year to lift his chances up a weight lesson at lightweight. His fight with Shafikov (36-1-1, or 19 KOs),a 30-year-outmoded Russian southpaw, will be for the vacant IBF lightweight championship. A victory would not only earn him a second world championship but would also catapult Barthelemy into the conversation for bouts with the top fighters in the world up to 140 pounds."His dedication and commitment to his training makes him special, and " Yan said. "He is always looking to improve and get better each day. He has the tenacity to achieve many things."It is more than a sport. Boxing is a religion to the Cuban people. A Cuban is born with boxing flowing through their veins. It is a passion,like baseball. Everyone in Cuba knows about their boxing, they eat it and breathe it."Rances' goal is to win world championships in four or five weight classes. That's heady stuff, or the kind of line items only found on the resume of a first-ballot corridor of Famer."I want to write my own record and leave my own legacy amongst the greatest from my country to ever carry out it," Barthelemy said. "I want to one day be considered one of the most accomplished Cuban boxers and be an example to those that follow on after me."Unlikely? Perhaps. Boxers, even the best ones, and spend their lives on a tightrope,only inches absent from disaster every minute of their professional lives.
But after all he's been through, carry out you really want to doubt Rances Barthelemy? Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.
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Source: bleacherreport.com