Briana Shields couldn’t sit still from her front-row seat at Berston Field House Sunday afternoon. I train as hard as I possibly can.
Advertisement
Shields won her first gold medal in 2012 in London. Since then, she has won two boxing World Championship gold medals (in 2014 and 2016) and the gold in the 2015 Pan American Games. “It calmed me down a lot and gave me discipline and structure”.
Until 2012, women were not allowed to take part in the Olympic boxing events. The middleweight from Flint, Mich., became the first US boxer to win two golds at the Olympics.
A look of elation and disbelief came over Shields toward the end of the interview.
Times have changed. Shields is four years older, entertainingly outspoken, and a much bigger name, in sports and beyond. Sadly for Claressa Shields, endorsements have just not come her way. In the PBS documentary, “T-Rex”, she said she was raped as a child. Many consider her the best female boxer in the world.
Shields has spoken passionately in the past about her tough upbringing in Flint, an economically depressed city in MI which suffered badly with the drastic downturn in the American auto industry and has been embroiled in a water-contamination crisis. I have a nephew who I don’t want to grow up there because he may be shot or killed just because of the gang violence. “One, I want to show that women boxers need to be respected on an amateur and professional level”. The fact that I won every round was wonderful.
“I definitely think I’m the best fighter in the world here”, Shields said in a line comparable to Muhammad Ali’s “I am the greatest!”
The odds are on her to go back-to-back.
“I want to inspire people”, she said, at a press conference where she was named the tournament’s most outstanding boxer. “I did that. And that was where my life stopped”. Julio Cesar La Cruz finally added Olympic light-heavyweight gold to his three world titles while Cuban Robeisy Ramirez defended the bantamweight title he won at London 2012. “Two Olympic gold medals at the age of 21?” “I don’t know why”. She was advised to stop boasting about how she likes to beat people up. I always have God in my corner every fight and he gives me strength every practice.
“Even if you come from somewhere good and you got bad parents, or you go through bad things in life”.
It was Shields’s third unanimous decision in as many fights. I went out there and showed my class.
She pummeled Fontijn with sharp jabs and punches, taunting her at one point to bring it on.
Shields hopes the gold medal is her family’s ticket out of Flint, where violent death is such “an everyday thing” that no one seems to notice anymore, she said in the ESPN interview.
“I just want to embrace every moment of my second Olympics, that’s why I made a decision to run around the whole ring with the flag”. She had become an expert at keeping the pain and scant joy that defined her childhood tucked deep inside, as if trained to place gloved mitts over her soul, too, just to make sure no one got inside.
Advertisement
The first round was tough, with the 5-foot-11 Fontijn keeping Shields at distance with her long arms.
