Scott Cardle had a bleeding bruise in the corner of his mouth but it was no problem. He had just reached the quarter-finals of the AIBA World Championships in Milan by winning the biggest match of his young career. Not so very long ago, he would not even have dreamed of making the English national team.

When Bradley Saunders, the top English light-welterweight, broke his left thumb in training prior to the World Championships the 19-year-old Cardle jumped at the opportunity. He made the team, has now won two bouts at the Mediolanum Forum and is preparing to meet the top seed, Roniel Iglesias Sotolongo of Cuba, in tomorrow's quarter-finals.

Today Cardle caused one of the major surprises of the event by beating seventh seed Alexis Vastine of France, bronze medallist at the Beijing Olympic Games. "During the summer I had a chance to spar with Vastine and Sotolongo in a training camp in France, so neither of them is unknown to me," said Cardle, who was third at this year's European Union Championships.

Mexican featherweight Óscar Valdez cannot be called a late bloomer. At 17 he had already represented his country at the Beijing Olympic Games, where he ran into the eventual winner Enkhbatyn Badar-Uugan of Mongolia in the first round. A few weeks later he won his weight class on home soil at the Junior World Championships in Guadalajara. Now he finds himself in the last eight here in Milan.

After beating Clive Atwell of Guyana and David Joyce of Ireland in the first two rounds, Valdez won a tightly contested match against Korean Joo Min Jae this afternoon. The toughness of the bout showed when he came to the interview corner holding a towel on to a bruise on his right cheek.

"It was not easy, but with my heart and my coach's good advice I was able to overcome the Serbian boxer," he said. "I know my parents and six sisters and brothers are following my matches on the internet, watching www.aiba.org. It is very important to know that they are behind me.

"I hail from the town of Nogales, but now I live in the capital, in a sports school financed by the Mexican Olympic Committee. We don't go out at nights, drinking is out of the question as I am an athlete. My goal is to win the 2012 London Olympics, therefore I am ready to sacrifice my youth. Here in Milan I am aiming to get the gold medal."

When Konstantin Buga, who was born in Kazakhstan, was finally given a German passport he did not think one day he would beat a Cuban boxer in the quarter-finals of the World Championships. But in the most thrilling bout of the afternoon he beat Rey Eduardo Recío, the fifth seed in the middleweight category.

"The Cuban was leading most of the time, but in the second interval my coach told me to think of my wife and two-year-old daughter, whom I had not seen for a month because we spent the last four weeks in a training camp," said Buga. "I did so, and with the strength I took from the memories I was able to score three decisive points, than hold on to the victory."