Category: Boxing / UFC / MMA

Boxing / UFC / MMA News

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Claressa Shields: ‘I’m not here for people to cry and feel sorry for me’

The two-time Olympic gold medal-winning boxer’s life has been turned into rousing drama The Fire Inside, written by Oscar winner Barry Jenkins

Claressa Shields was two months removed from defending her Olympic gold medal at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games when an email from Hollywood landed in her inbox. Universal Studios wanted to make a movie about her life story. For Shields, who had spent much of her career fighting for recognition in a sport that marginalized women when they weren’t ignoring them entirely, the offer felt like more than just a career milestone. It was a rare mainstream acknowledgment of her achievements and a chance to amplify to a wider audience the struggles she had endured in and out of the ring.

“I never checked my emails back then,” Shields says with a laugh. “But I saw the subject line, and it said something about a movie. I thought, ‘A movie about my life? OK, let’s see what they’re talking about.’” That email kicked off a series of phone calls and meetings with the Oscar-winning screenwriter Barry Jenkins and other industry heavyweights. “We negotiated for a year. I was only 20, so I made sure I had a lawyer,” she recalls. “I wasn’t going to just sign anything. But once the contract was finalized, the ball started rolling.”

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Time for Tyson Fury to consider leaving the stage after Usyk defeat dims aura

The Briton stayed the distance against Oleksandr Usyk but after back-to-back defeats what is left for the 36-year-old to prove?

In the end everyone runs out of road. It was probably necessary for Tyson Fury to say he was robbed in the Kingdom Arena on Saturday night. Boxing demands this level of irrationality. Logical multimillionaires do not willingly schedule a brain-jarring, soul‑shredding half-hour beating from one of the most effective practitioners of controlled violence ever to walk the planet. A basic suspension of reason is required. Without it no one would ever step in the ring.

So Fury will maintain that all three judges were wrong to award a unanimous points decision in Oleksandr Usyk’s favour after 12 thrillingly intense rounds in Riyadh. Last time out Fury said he lost because of the war in Ukraine. This time he said it was because of Christmas. Nobody was robbed here. Fury, the challenger, needed to go out and actively take the heavyweight belts. In the event the champion always seemed to have his head above the water.

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Generation TikTok: how sportswomen set the bar higher than the men

Female athlete power on social media became ever more strident in 2024 – but the backlash also damaged careers and wellbeing

Lina Nielsen remembers the moment she had the idea. She was sitting around the Olympic Village in Paris with her sprinting teammates – and she was bored. “I said to Yemi Mary John: ‘I’m gonna make this TikTok’,” Nielsen recalls. She took herself to her bedroom, got out the flip phone each athlete had been given and typed into an Excel spreadsheet: “Where you at? Holla at me.”

Her five-second spoof of Kelly Rowland’s music-video texting fail took hardly longer than that to make. It also got 8m views. “It’s funny that the videos that do that best are the ones you don’t put any effort in,” says Nielsen with a laugh. She is still trying to make sense of the fact that her TikTok channel was the most popular of any British athlete at the Games, beating even the knit-tastic Tom Daley in second place. At the end of the Olympic fortnight her channels had been viewed by more than the Australian and German teams combined.

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