A Cardigan boxer has returned home from the World Boxing Cup in Germany with a silver medal as part of Team GB.

Light-middleweight, Garan Croft was one of nine medalists for GB Boxing at the World Boxing Cup in Cologne.

Garan hails from the small Pembrokeshire village of Crymych, which has around 800 inhabitants.

He and twin brother Ioan began boxing at Cardigan ABC at the age of eight.

At 17, the pair moved up to Cardiff to train with the Wales team, and in January 2022 they were selected for the Great Britain Podium Squad at the Team GB training camp at Sheffield.

The following March they took home a brace of silver medals from the European Under-22 Championships in Porec, Croatia and that summer Ioan and Garan captured gold and bronze medals respectively at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.

A Team GB review at the end of last year named the Croft Twins as part of British boxing’s Olympic hopes for Paris 2024.

At the World Boxing Cup GB Boxing took home nine medals, including three golds, for Charley Davison and Elise Glynn of England and Wales’s Taylor Bevan.

Along with Garan, Demie-Jade Resztan, Rosie Eccles and Patrick Brown who all won silver while light-welterweight, Joe Tyers, and light-middleweight, Harris Akbar, returned home with bronze.

Garan made it to the finals of the light-middleweight class where he found himself on the wrong side of a narrow 3:2 defeat against Germany’s Magomed Schachidov.

GB Boxing’s Performance Director, Rob McCracken said: “The World Boxing Cup in Cologne has been an excellent tournament that has provided our boxers with valuable experience.

“The quality of the competition has been very high with some excellent nations participating and it has been a very good week for our team in which we have learnt a lot about the group and seen some outstanding individual performances from a number of boxers.

“This is exactly the kind of test our boxers needed at this stage in the Olympic cycle and has given us a lot of positives to work with as we head into 2024 and the remaining Olympic qualifiers.”

Six other members of the GB Boxing squad that competed in Cologne but did not win a medal included Kiaran MacDonald, Jack Dryden, Ramtin Musah, Sam Hickey, Gemma Richardson and Kerry Davis.

The ‘World Boxing Cup: Cologne 2023’ was delivered by the German Boxing Association in collaboration with World Boxing, the new international federation that has been established to ensure boxing remains at the heart of the Olympic Movement.