Team GB’s Lauren Price is through to the middleweight boxing final at Tokyo 2020, proving that skilled sportsmanship is completely versatile.
Lauren Price has just won the middleweight boxing semi-finals to secure her place in Sunday’s battle for gold. Price beat her long-time rival Nouchka Fontijn, a Dutch boxer classed as one of the best in the world, in the last round of the fight.
“I knew I was up against it today,” Price told BBC Sports after her win. “We’ve fought each other a number of times and know one another inside out. [Fontijn] is world class. Each fight gets harder but it doesn’t get harder than that.”
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She also added: “It’s nothing new to me, going into a final. I’ve been here before.” While it’s true that Price won gold in the 2018 Commonwealth Games and 2019 European Games, her sporting success doesn’t end there.
At the age of 12, Price was a World Champion kickboxer. She then went on to become a pro footballer, earning 52 caps for Wales and winning the 2013 Football Association of Wales Club Player of the Year for her success with Cardiff City – the same year that Gareth Bale took home the men’s prize.
Price has previously credited her kickboxing prowess with helping her improve her football skills, telling The Daily Telegraph that it helped her to “kick a ball a lot further than any of my teammates”.
But it was watching Nicola Adams’ success as a female boxer that persuaded her to transition from the pitch to the ring. “I had a decision to make between boxing and football,” she told BBC Sport in 2014. “With the Olympic journey starting with the Commonwealth Games, I decided that it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I just had to take it.”
Now, aged 27, she’s fighting for her first Olympic gold, proving that there’s no such thing as ‘too late’. If anything, trying your hand at a variety of sports is actually a great way to succeed. “Many people think that their career is over once they stop competing in a certain sport,” says physiotherapist and weight lifting coach Samantha Williams. “The Olympics this year has proved that sport can give you so many transferable skills and abilities that you really could be just as wonderful – if not better – at something else.”
While not all of us are blessed enough to be in the top class divisions of multiple sports, that’s still an important lesson. If an injury has stopped you from your passion of running, or you can feel yourself falling out of love with weight lifting, it doesn’t mean your training has to stop. Emily Campbell, the silver medalist in weightlifting, proved this too: she started life as ashot-putter who only beganlifting to improve her performance. She ended up fallingin love with the sport in its own right.
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Often, it can feel like you have to put yourself in a box as a yogi, gym goer, runner, tennis player, swimmer or Crossfitter. But Price proves that you can do – and excel – at more than one thing. Plus, as Price herself said in 2014, “I can always go back to football. It’s not the end of the journey.”
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Images: Getty
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