COMPETITION is so fierce in the new Dubois family home even an Olympic hero can get the last pick of the bedrooms.
British heavyweight champ Daniel, Olympic youth queen Caroline and rising Repton schoolboy Prince moved into their new Romford house just in time for lockdown.
And they have all set up camp under the watchful eye of dad Dave, who somehow copes with cooking for his freakishly talented and hungry kids.
Caroline, 19, is taking the sessions while laid-back “Dynamite” Dan prepares for his post-lockdown war with Joe Joyce — which has twice been postponed amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
The enforced break is DDD’s first in three whirlwind years that have returned 14 wins, 13 KOs and every possible domestic honour.
While 2016 Olympic silver winner Joyce will probably be 35 when they finally meet — hopefully in autumn at The O2 — Dubois will have 12 years on him and been kept fresh by his younger siblings.
After another gruelling session, Daniel told SunSport: “Caroline takes the training sessions every day, she enjoys picking the exercises and circuits more than I do.
“She has our youngest brother Solomon acting like the teacher’s assistant so there is no slacking.
“I wish I was fighting now but I am trying to take any positives there and, apart from spending time with the family, the idea that I can use this break to relax, recover and improve is a good one.
“The last three years have been relentless with fights and training camps, even if a fight has only gone two or three rounds, there were weeks of hard sparring in the build-up to those few minutes.
Every day I wake up hoping the gyms have reopened and that I can start looking at a fight date.
“It can take its toll, I don’t feel that it has on me but I have youth on my side and there are a few big names ahead of me in the queue for a world title shot, so I would rather have this break now than later in my career.
“Every day I wake up hoping the gyms have reopened and that I can start looking at a fight date.”
Caroline’s last bout, her first as a senior amateur, was an Olympic qualifier win at Stratford’s Copper Box on March 14 — just days before the event was cancelled and the Tokyo Games later postponed.
The emphatic victory took her record to 41-0 but it came at a huge cost to the reigning BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year.
She said: “When we moved here, because I was boxing at the qualifiers, my brothers and sisters all got first pick of the bedrooms.
“So it meant I got stuck with the back room.
“It doesn’t matter if you are out representing your country in a fight, we are still all just siblings trying to win at everything at home.
“I love it when we train as a family. I got into the sport through watching Daniel, seeing what he goes through with the pain and sacrifice and I never saw Daniel slack off.
“Now I know I have two younger brothers watching me, I know I have to do the same so they understand what it takes.
“Usually we can all be motivated by a big fight, a qualifier or a tournament but right now we are all stuck not knowing what is happening so we are pulling together more than ever.”
When quizzed on what sort of trainer’s fee the teenager is commanding from her big bro, she joked: “We need to discuss my new wages as head trainer actually. I think he wants to get me on a pay-as-you-go deal but I don’t like the sound of that.
“I might base it on how hard he works, if I am impressed with a session he might get some discount.”
At the Canning Town sweatbox Daniel usually trains at, mentor Martin Bowers likes the old-school approach of plenty of running and sparring.
So Dubois smiled when he saw Joyce had been using a virtual reality boxing game to help keep himself in shape for their mouthwatering meeting.
He said: “I saw that Joe had been using a computer game for some of his training but that stuff doesn’t interest me.
“Nothing like that is going to help him cope with what I am going to be bringing to him.
If there are no Olympics next year then I will definitely turn over but I do feel, with what everyone around the world is going through and suffering, that it would be great to get the Olympics on.
“We like to keep our training old school, the circuits and sessions that we do are ingrained into us, like a part of our DNA. We don’t need machines to help us fight, fighting machines are what we are.”
Lightweight master Caroline will quit the unpaid ranks and turn professional if the Games are delayed any longer than 12 months.
The southpaw prodigy is desperate for the healing properties of the event to be enjoyed around the coronavirus-hit world and it is safe to assume her potential pro rivals would prefer to spend another year outside of her firing line too.
She said: “If there are no Olympics next year then I will definitely turn over but I do feel, with what everyone around the world is going through and suffering, that it would be great to get the Olympics on.
“The Olympics has a way of bringing people together and inspiring people.
“It could maybe even help to heal a few places that have been affected and I would love to be a part of that.”
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