Nicola Adams: ‘I can’t start a family while I’m still boxing. But it’s something I’d like to do’

The double Olympic champion on early family battles, the psychology of the ring, and the two women who have been the bedrock of her life

A tracksuited Nicola Adams walks into 34 Mayfair in the West End of London much in the way you’ve seen her approach the boxing ring or carry the union jack around the track for Team GB: quietly confident, smiling fit to burst, keen to get at it. A couple of nights before our lunch the double Olympic champion had gone three rounds in front of a home crowd in Leeds against a tough Mexican called Maryan Salazar, a fight which ended with Adams landing a mesmerising series of unanswerable punches to her opponent’s head. But looking at her now, 48 hours on, you’d never guess that is how she spent her weekend. She is a veteran of 200 amateur and two professional fights, but her face reveals no sign of ever having been hit (“that’s the bit I try to avoid,” she says).

Adams is no great lover of fancy restaurants – when she won the first of her gold medals, in London, she celebrated her homecoming in Yorkshire with a cheeky Nando’s with her family – but good steak is always welcome, she suggests, so she orders a 12oz fillet medium rare, and (because she is out of training for a week) a bowl of chips and a celebratory mojito. She’s having a very enjoyable day, she says. How so? Well, she has done a Q&A event at the JP Morgan bank, and later she is off to do some radio interviews: a timetable which suggests there is no kind of day that Adams does not find very enjoyable just now. (To prove the point she confesses she had a “great time” listening to Piers Morgan mansplain women’s boxing to her on Good Morning).

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2jo8Kj3