Next year’s Olympics sees women take to the boxing ring – the only new sport added to the 2012 Games. Keme Nzerem reports on the rise in women’s boxing and talks to some of the 2012 contenders.
In gyms up and down the country, women aren’t just taking boxercise classes but are pulling on gloves for real. And now for the first time they will be weighing in with their male colleagues at the Olympics.
With the games around the corner, British fighters are now some of the best in the world. Off the back of its inclusion for London 2012 – and lottery funding for those expected to do well – British women are taking on all comers and at the European Championships last month they came home with a gold, two silvers and two bronzes.
Nicola Adams is Britain’s new flyweight European champion, and now she is going for gold at the Olympics.
If she wasn’t belting hell out of the heavy bag week in week out, Nicola would have finished her studies as a computer programmer. But she has always been athletic, and when her mum took her to the gym for keep fit classes, aged just 13, something else caught her eye, and she was hooked.
Nicola grew up with the sport – “watching it in front of the TV with my Dad” – and is now the hardest puncher in her weight category.
There was a time when women couldn’t do the pole-vaulting, the sprinting. But things change over time. It’s about equal opportunities. Nicola Adams, flyweight European Champion
“It was the only sport in the Olympics without a female counterpart, but now it’s finally in,” she told Channel 4 News.
“A lot of sports started out like that though. There was a time when women couldn’t do the pole-vaulting, the sprinting. But things change over time. It’s about equal opportunities I suppose, isn’t it?”
Read more: London 2012, the race to the finish line and beyond.
For Natasha Jonas, light-welterweight European bronze medallist, the appeal of boxing is that it is all down to the individual.
“I’ve played a lot of team sports myself – when you lose, you’ve got 10 or 11 other people you can blame. I like to get in the ring, and the only person you can blame is yourself,” she said.
But controversies remain. Some fighters have been made to wear skirts by their own teams. This might become an issue again at the Olympics, as some in the sport think it will make it more popular.
In the past, the Olympics refused to let women box at all, saying that there simply weren’t enough of them, meaning that there would be too many dangerous mismatches – too many smashed noses. But the boxers insist that there are now plenty of competitors – that what they do is safe.
Risking the odd black eye is an equality worth fighting for, they say.