July 8, 2012

BUENOS AIRES (JTA) — Carolina Raquel Duer successfully defended her World Boxing Organization’s super flyweight champion title.

Making the fifth defense of her title, Duer, 33, of Buenos Aires, defeated  European champion Corina Carlescu with a technical knockout in the fifth round. Duer knocked down her Romanian opponent with a left cross in the fourth round. The referee stopped the match on round five.

A crowd of 1,000, including Mayor Pablo Bruera and former world light welterweight champion Juan Coggi, stayed until early Saturday morning to watch the bout on the university campus of La Plata City.

“It was the hardest fight of my career, for the first time I have pain in my body. This helps me to learn,” Duer told National Public Television, which aired the fight live..  

Duer, known as “The Turk,” is the daughter of Syrian immigrants to Argentina. She attended the capital’s Jaim Najman Bialik Primary School, celebrated her bat mitzvah at a Conservative synagogue, and spent more than a month in Israel working on a kibbutz and touring the country. On weekends she went to the local Maccabi club and attended Jewish summer camp.

As an amateur, she won 19 of 20 fights. In 2007, she turned professional. Three years later she won the World Boxing Organization’s title by defeating Lorena Pedazza by decision. Now she has a professional record of twelve wins and three losses.

Duer is the eighth Argentinean woman to hold a World Boxing Organization boxing championship and the first Jewish one.

But she’s hardly the country’s first Jewish fighter. As in the United States, decades ago Jews were leading figures in the Latin American boxing world. In 1940, Argentina’s Jaime Averboch won the welterweight title but died the same year without defending his title. Recently retired Mariano Plotinsky (“The Demolisher”), who has fought with a Star of David on his shorts, held the OMB Intercontinental title but lost his bid for a heavyweight class world title in 2010.

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