Boxing gym bid gets charity help

4:53pm Wednesday 3rd December 2008

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A boxing club has received help with its £200,000 bid to build a gym.

Abingdon Town Amateur Boxing Club, which currently trains at Dalton Barracks, was last month given a cheque for £1,700 towards its fundraising attempt.

The money was raised during charity football tournament Play to Give at Oxford City Football Club’s grounds in July.

This is the second year the charity event has taken place.

Tournament organiser, twenty-year-old Andrew Baker — who in April was nominated for Britain’s Most Inspiring Fundraiser Award — has decided to split the profits between the boxing club and the Oxford Children’s Hospital Charity.

Alison Stone, the club’s fundraising secretary, said: “The money will go into a fundraising account towards the new gym where we have to raise the £200,000. “This will take us over the £10,000 mark.

“We are so pleased, we just can’t believe Andrew Baker chose us.

“He really is a saint.”

The boxing club has been granted planning permission for a custom-built gymnasium at the Caldecott recreation centre which, if built, would also be used by other youth groups in the area.

Mr Baker, of Kings Walk, Didcot, started raising money for charity in 2003, after receiving life-saving surgery to remove a brain tumour at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, two years earlier.

He said: “I am thrilled to have raised this money for what I believe is an incredibly important cause.

“This is the second time we have done this event and it has got bigger and better.

“We can’t wait to do it all again next year.”