Mary Kom

[raven]

I want to talk about Mary Kom.

Mary Kom is an Indian boxer, from Imphal in Manipur (the northeast of India, for those who don't know - more than a thousand miles from Delhi). She's a light flyweight, which means she weighs rather a lot less than 51kg, and her name is Mangte Chungneijang Mary Kom. The name in lights she was fighting under was Mangte Chungneijang, but they announced her as "Mary Kom" probably because that's what she calls herself, and the crowd in the arena had, delightfully, done their homework - they chanted, "Mary! Mary! Mary!" when she stepped into the ring.

From where we were sitting, we had a perfect view. When she stepped into the ring to fight the Polish boxer Karolina Michalczuk I thought she looked so tiny - and she is tiny; her customary weight class, light flyweight, isn't an Olympic weight class, at least this year, so she's fighting women with 5kg on her - but she laid a couple of punches and she was electrifying. The crowd loved her. An Irish kid a few rows down from us folded over his flag so he could support India with it. She was aggressive and clever and graceful and the crowd were chanting her name and when she won her match I stood up and shrieked. She's through to the quarter-finals and fights against the Tunisian contender on Monday.

I just... say whatever you like about the Olympics, the corporate bullshit, I'll probably agree. But she's a five-foot Indian woman from Imphal stood in a boxing ring this afternoon and had a crowd of thousands screaming her name, and if she does go on to win she will not only be India's first gold medallist this time around but the world's first women's boxing Olympic champion.The BBC have profiled her as favourite for gold; the Economist have done it as well.

(Natasha Jonas, the British lightweight, beat her American opponent decisively also with thousands of people cheering for her. She's from Liverpool! She went to Edge Hill, and she's a youth worker for Toxteth Council. Doesn't it amaze you how extraordinary people can be.)

In the meantime, NBC's analyst magnanimously allows that women's boxing ought to be permitted, after all.

Comments

[philomytha]

Ooh, that sounds like something to go and track down on the BBC website, she sounds amazing. And yeah, I know what you mean, there's a ton of bullshit around the Olympics, but there are still these beautiful amazing stories at the heart of it all.

And yay for getting in to see something! We've got tickets to the showjumping on Wednesday, and I am so excited :-).

[marina]

Ooh thank you for this post! I haven't been keeping up with a lot of the Olympics, I didn't even know women's boxing was going on.

[noldo]

Mary Kom is really so wonderful, isn't she? And there's a lot wrapped up in "Firstly for my state, Manipur, and for my country, for India", even as I'm blindingly annoyed by that BBC article for the And there is another problem. Living just 100km from the Burmese border, Manipurians don't even look Indian. thing -- can we stop doing the legislation-of-what-gets-to-be-'Indian-looking' thing some time, please?

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

Hooray for all of this! (On the subject of women in combat-based sports, someone I know linked to this (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/andrewmcfbrown/100174361/womens-judo-its-disturbing-to-watch-these-girls-beat-each-other-up/) infuriating Telegraph piece. Stop talking nonsense about women's "soft limbs"!)

[bibliotropic.livejournal.com]

Eee! Just reading your description of her brought tears to my eyes. So exciting! I'll be cheering for her as well.

[true-masquerade.livejournal.com]

Reading this story gives me the best kind of chills. It's stuff like this that makes the Olympics fascinating and exciting, and generally like nothing else :-)

[bekkypk.livejournal.com]

I'll cheer for her too! :) Your description is awesome!
xx