Nicola Adams

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2016

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway is Nicola Adams. She made history when she won the first ever Olympic gold medal in women's boxing at London 2012, retaining it in Rio 2016. She is the first woman fighter to hold European, World, Commonwealth and Olympic titles. Having watched classic Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard fights on TV as she was growing up, she entered the ring for the first time at a working men's club when she was only 13. When she was 14, her mother contracted meningitis and for several months Nicola looked after herself and her younger brother. She turned to acting in order to help fund her boxing training, appearing as an extra in Coronation Street and Emmerdale. She first represented her country when she was 18. In 2009 it was announced that women's boxing would feature for the first time at the London Olympics, although before her selection for Team GB she fell down stairs and had to recover from a fracture in one of her vertebra. In 2012 she topped The Independent newspaper's Pink List of the most powerful LGBT people in public life, was made an MBE for services to boxing in 2013 and received a 'Paving The Way' award at the 2016 Mobo awards. Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:02.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.
0:05.0	Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:10.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:14.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co. UK.
0:20.0	UK slash Radio 4. My castaway this week is the boxer, Nicola Adams, the first ever woman fighter to hold European World Commonwealth and Olympic titles,
0:46.2	she has blazed her trail with a sunny disposition that belies the brutality she meets out in the ring.
0:51.9	They call her the baby-faced assassin. Her perfect bone structure
0:56.1	and symmetrical smile say as much about her skill as all those medals she keeps winning.
1:01.3	She doesn't rush her work and to watch her boxes to witness a
1:04.4	master class in clean tidy technical fighting. Interesting then that as a child she
1:10.4	learned chess long before she learned how to throw a punch.
1:14.0	Within a year of walking through the doors of her local boxing club she had won her first match.
1:19.0	She says for me it's always been about not getting hit. Even throughout London 2012 I never
1:26.0	had a mark on me. I see boxing as a game of chess where you are constantly
1:30.4	drawing on your skills and tactics.
1:32.6	So welcome, Nikla.
1:33.8	With chess, I suppose there's never any risk
1:35.4	that you're going to get carted out of the arena
1:37.3	on a stretcher, however.
1:38.9	Do you thrive on that threat of danger?
1:41.5	Yeah, I do.
	...

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