The girls punched hard. From across India they came to this big, steamy government-run gym. Before entering the boxing ring, they bowed their heads to the floor, as though entering a temple. A sweet-shop owner’s daughter let loose a right hook. A construction worker’s daughter leaned against the rope, streams of sweat dripping from her face. Bouncing, ducking, like a grasshopper on speed, was a short girl from Calcutta with close-set eyes; she had forsaken her sister’s wedding for a chance to come here and fight. The thud of glove against glove echoed against the cavernous walls.
In a country with numerous obstacles for them, young women are gearing up to punch in the big league.
The International Olympic Committee earlier this month announced the entry of women’s boxing in the 2012 London Games. India was among the countries pushing to break the gender bar.
“This is my dream come true,” Mangte Chungneijang Merykom, 27, India’s most acclaimed boxer, better known as Mary Kom, said this week.
Kom is India’s greatest hope in the boxing competition. Since the International Boxing Association started the women’s world championships in 2001, Kom holds the record with four gold medals.
With relatively little support from the government, Indian women have performed surprisingly well in the world championships. China is India’s stiffest competitor. In the last championships, held in Ningbo City, China, the home team won 11 medals, followed by Russia’s five, and four each by India and the US.
Kom, having just returned from a training camp in Beijing, was quick to explain why. Even the coaches in China are fit, she said, and athletes are served meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. India’s modest sports camps serve meat or fish once a day. The athletes wash their own clothes by hand. There are no dedicated physical therapists for boxers who are injured.
No matter. Boxing represents a new kind of freedom to the women who entered this steamy, old-fashioned ring on India’s southern tip.
Hema Yogesh, 16, a spice farmer’s daughter, ran away from home to join her first boxing camp. Her father was furious at first. But soon, she brought home her first gold medal from a state competition. Her schoolmates showered her with garlands and cheers. Her father, she said, burst out in tears. She did too. He now wants her to compete internationally.
Boxing, Hema said, had taught her “courage.”
It also fueled ambition. Like most of the girls at this camp, Hema sees boxing as a ticket to a middle-class life. The Indian government rewards athletes with coveted government employment, usually with the police or with the railways. No one in Hema’s family has ever had a government job.
What would life be like without boxing, Hema was asked. She would have had to stay at home, she said, and look after the family’s two cows. She made a face.
For other women, boxing brings less tangible rewards: the confidence to go out on the streets without fear, for instance. Or as a boxer named Usha Nagisetty put it, a chance to be somebody.
“Before boxing, I had nothing,” said Nagisetty, 24, who came to train this summer at another camp, in the central Indian city of Bhopal. “Who is Usha? No one knew. I was fat. I was average in studies. I didn’t think life had anything to offer me.”
Kom is today among her country’s most prized athletes. She has a job for life in the police department, a government-built bungalow and a host of lucrative honors, including the nation’s highest prize in sports, the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, which she will be awarded this week, along with prize money of nearly US$15,000.
To get there, she had to fight several personal bouts.
At 17, she left home to join a government-run sports training center in Imphal, the capital of her home state, Manipur, and begged the boxing coach to let her enter the ring.
“She was so small, I told her no,” the coach, L. Ibomcha Singh, said. Tears rolled down her face. The coach relented.
Kom kept boxing a secret from her family — until she won a state championship in 2000, and everyone, including her parents, discovered what she had been up to. Her father goaded her to give it up. Boxing is too dangerous, he told her. Members of her clan disapproved. The boys in her hometown ridiculed her. She held out.
“One day, I will show you who I am,” she recalled thinking.
One medal came after another, then marriage, then more pressure to give up fighting.
“My father told me, ‘OK, you leave it now. You’re married,’” she said. She resisted that too. Her husband, K. Onkholer, a former soccer player, stood by her.
Today, the two of them together run a makeshift sports academy out of their home, in part as a way to keep local children out of trouble. Manipur, nestled in the hills bordering Myanmar, is known for its network of drug runners and armed insurgents; children are drawn into both.
Kom’s greatest test came after the birth of her twin boys, in August 2007. For more than 18 months, she stayed out of the ring. Returning was tough on body and soul. Her back hurt. Her reflexes had slowed. It was hard to wean the boys off her breasts, harder still to leave them at home and go off to camp for a month at a time. She lost her first match, in September of last year.
She did not give up. She trained harder than ever before. Two months later, she was back in the ring for the women’s world championships in Ningbo City. She won her record fourth gold medal.
Fighting in the 2012 Olympics is her latest crucible. Weighing barely 46kg, Kom has fought in the pinweight category. To compete in the Olympics, she must be at least 48kg, the lowest of three weight slots established for women.
“I will pray to God to keep my body fit,” she said. “Because if my body is fit, I can do anything.”
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