Lauren Price: boxing’s new ‘superstar’ who played international football and juggled training and driving taxis

CNN
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When Lauren Price was eight years old, she set three goals for herself: to become a world kickboxing champion, to play international football for Wales and to compete in the Olympics.

For most people, growing up involves making choices, giving up multiple dreams to focus all their energies on one, in the hopes that just one, if they’re lucky, might come true.

But Lauren Price never had to make that decision. By age 12, she was world kickboxing champion, a title she won three more times.

Before turning 18, she had already played football for Wales twice at senior level and a further 50 times at under-16, under-17 and under-19 levels, where she was captain of his team. Football and kickboxing were checked off the list.

Then watching female boxers fight in an Olympic ring for the first time at London 2012 inspired another goal in Price, and she took up the sport soon after, leaving football to take up her focus.

It was the sport that took her to the Olympics where, remarkably, she won a gold medal at Tokyo 2020 in the women’s middleweight division.

And, on Saturday, she took another step forward by becoming Wales’ first female world champion boxer by defeating Jessica McCaskill by a unanimous technical decision after the fight in Cardiff, Wales, was stopped prematurely on medical advice to treat McCaskill’s injured and swollen eye. .

“This is just the beginning,” Price, now a WBA, IBO and Ring Magazine welterweight champion, told Sky Sports. “I want to build a legacy and create greatness… You see what Katie Taylor did for Ireland, I want to do the same for Wales.”

But, despite seemingly seamlessly realizing all of his childhood dreams, Price had to fight hard to achieve them, both outside and inside the ring.

When she started boxing, Price juggled her training with her work as a teaching assistant, providing support to a girl with special educational needs, and later as a taxi driver for her grands’ company. -parents, driving people to and from Cardiff on Friday and Saturday evenings.

Her grandparents, Linda and Derek, raised her from the age of three days old.

They were the ones who first introduced Price to sport, initially as a way to express all of his childhood energy, Linda told the National Lottery, which funds British athletes, in 2021.

“They always supported me and told me to believe in my dreams. My grandmother used to say ‘Reach for the moon, if you don’t make it you’ll land on the stars’,” Price told Sky Sports.

“Even now she gave me a good luck card and I’ll read it before fight night, it’s just little things.”

Price’s grandfather, Derek, died in November 2020, before he could see her become an Olympic champion and become boxing’s new “superstar”, as Boxxer’s promoter Ben Shalom said, according to the BBC .

“I believe if you work hard enough and you have dreams you can achieve them,” Price told Sky Sports on Saturday ahead of his world title fight.

“I was a child once and I had three things… I managed to achieve all three thanks to the love and support of my grandparents. »