Ramla Ali who was bullied at school for being overweight, took up a boxing career. Now she’s a British boxing champion, a model and the first Muslim woman to win a boxing title for England.
The amateur featherweight boxer was prepared to be the first boxer to represent her home country Somalia at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo this August until the corona virus pandemics struck.
As a child, her family fled Somali during the war after her eldest brother, who was just nine at the time, died as a result of a grenade that was thrown into their front garden as they played. Her family took refuge in London.
Due to her beginnings, she doesn’t seem to have a birth record. Although she believes she is between the ages of 27 and 30. “I genuinely don’t know the date, the month, the year,” she told Evening Standard.
A major secret she kept from her family is she took up boxing to knock off her weight, her mother thought it was immodest for women to play sports.
“When you come from an African household, education is key, ” her mother used to say, but she is her “number-one fan” today.
According to her, the first time she entered her local gym in East Ham, London, she had to wait up to 40 minutes to use the changing rooms because there were no facilities for women. “I was the only girl there,” she said.
In 2016, she became the best amateur boxer in the country in her weight division; she won the Elite National Championships, English Title Series and the Great British Elite Championships. In 2018, she represented her birth country, Somalia at an international level.
Somalia had no boxing federation so Ali and her husband and trainer Richard Moore created a boxing federation in the UK. Ali now travels around the world for competitions.
As model she was shot for British Vogue’s September 2019 “Forces For Change” issue, she said: “To see girls that look like me, with an afro, on the cover of magazines is amazing.”
“Beauty is 100% strength within yourself,” Ali said. “You have to feel it – that’s what beauty means to me. There are so many pretty women out there, but if you don’t feel like a beautiful person inside then you’ve gone from a ten to a two. As cheesy as it sounds, I truly believe that.”
She is gives back to her community by volunteering to teach self-defense classes to “predominately hijab-wearing” women, between the ages of 20-40, in south London once a week.
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