Thursday, January 20, 2011

Boxing after 2700 years

Two months to go before the tickets for the London Olympics 2012 go on sale. No prizes for guessing that the boxing is high on my list of things to see, it is very exciting that women are finally being allow to compete.

Anyone watching the amateur world championships last September for the first time would have been shocked at the standard - higher and higher with each fight. The days when women fighting was a freak-show are long-gone with most trainers now happy to take on women fighters in their gyms. It's still a macho world but at least the doors are open now. One Dublin trainer I talked to a few weeks back just grinned when I asked him how he feels about the women training in his gym: "If you want to fight in a man's game, you have to fight like a man," he said as he threw the female fighters into sparring with the boys. Nice.




The video is from the successful "Let Them Box" campaign run to end 2,700 years of waiting to compete in the Olympics. You'll meet many of these women over the next few months here.
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2 comments

William K Wallace said...

There must some tough woman in Ireland! From doing years of Kickboxing, even the toughest girls I spared with they could hardly ever hit me and I sure couldn’t throw anything there way apart from a slight slap.

If men or woman want to bash there brains in it should be their choice. As much as I liked training and sparing, I knew that coming out of training session with my head spinning from getting hit wasn't good for me!

niamh said...

Sadly, lots of the best things just aren't good for us! I've never been able to fully articulate why the pain matters less than the exhilaration but it just is. Or was, it's been a few years now since I did anything that energetic!

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