How fate changed my career to boxing - Patricia Mbata
Posted : 08 September 2023
When Patricia Mbata decided to try a new sport, she surprisingly chose boxing.
Despite never having boxed before, she had heard a lot of good things about the sport and was excited to pursue something she may not be cut out for but had chosen for herself.
“Boxing wasn't even in my vocabulary when I was young,” she admits in the chat with Olympics.com.
“It was athletics, it was football, it was netball. It was all the sports that you would do more so in school that were more common.”
Even her mum couldn’t understand why her daughter, a project manager in a construction company, would choose boxing as a hobby, but there was no turning back.
Mbata had decided to give boxing a go and finally settled on the nearest gym in her neighbourhood, Finchley, unaware of the club’s rich sporting history.
"In boxing, you've got a rainbow of people in every gym. You've got different religions, colours, you've got like coaches, and it's just a beautiful rainbow.
"Everyone speaks the same language and that's boxing,” she explains, describing the attraction she felt towards the sport.
It wasn't just about honing her defensive and punching skills, but also her mental abilities.
“There are just so many benefits to this sport. Mentally, it just gives you so much confidence. It just releases like whatever it is, all the tension, the stress.
"Even when you're just punching the bag, you're not even sparring. You just feel so filled, and you just feel like you just got a weight off your shoulder.”
The boxing gym in Barnet, in the northern outskirts of London, is where British superstar Joshua began his amateur career.
“We're always having conversations when I see him, and he's always just saying, ‘just do it, just do it’. And I feel as if I have that same philosophy of life.
"My mentality and my ethos and what I believe in is very similar to what Josh (Anthony Joshua) advises people - ‘just do it’.
“I can just personally say he's a really lovely person,” she says of Joshua, who occasionally returns to his old gym where he trained as a teenager to support up-and-coming boxers like Mbata.
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