People don’t believe Niamh Mitchell when she tells them she’s a boxer.
After all, the 19-year-old Fifer doesn’t look like someone who spends her life being thumped in the face.
“‘People don’t believe I’m a boxer. Some of them think it’s white-collar stuff… but there is a way of proving it, obviously,” she tells BBC Sport Scotland with a glint in her eye. “I now just tell them to search my name.”
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If anyone does, they would discover a fighter of some promise.
Mitchell became Scotland’s first major female gold medal-winner at the European Junior Championships in 2022, and recently claimed her country’s first senior female international gold in Hungary.
And now she has been confirmed as one of 12 Team Scotland boxers competing at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow later this summer.
Mitchell’s target? Gold in the 60-65kg welterweight category. So much so, that she’s already seen herself on the podium and heard the anthem playing.
“I’m a total manifester,” she says. “I love manifesting stuff to happen. I did the exact same with the Euros and I won that, so I believe in that stuff. Just me with a gold medal, on top of the podium, my home crowd, anthem playing…
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“A gold medal is the aim because I’ve had a really strong start to the year, so I don’t think it’s out of reach at all.”
It’s all a long way from the five-year-old who took up kick-boxing in Rosyth as a way to dissuade some “nasty kids” who were giving her grief.
Mitchell suggests she “used it once” and didn’t need to again, but by the time she became a teenager her attentions had switched to boxing at Bowhill Miners.
By 14, she was representing Scotland and now, five years on, she’s watching Commonwealth Games opening ceremony clips online and “totally psyching myself up” for what’s to come in Glasgow.
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“It’s a good buzz, not a nervous buzz,” says Mitchell, who commutes from Fife to Glasgow each day to train. “It all kind of hit me when I was trying on the kit and stuff. I’m just going to go there and enjoy it.”
[BBC]
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