Freddie Barr deserves recognition
KINGSTON boxing coach Freddie Barr passed away on January 19. He was 88 years old.
He was an England coach, who took boxers to a sequence of Olympic Games, and a highly respected figure in the amateur boxing.
Barr deserves recognition for the hundreds of boxers he guided over a period of decades, including professional fighters and successful internationals. Bobby Wells, bronze medallist at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, was just one of the charges Barr brought through.
Freddie [
pictured below] was a trailblazer, ahead of his time both in his training methods and the opportunities he created. In the 1980s he took an England team to box in Northern Ireland with Gerry Storey despite the Troubles. In May 1989 he took the first professional boxers to box in the former Soviet Union.