The Boxing Mother

Early in the morning, in a small village in the hills of Manipur, a girl tied up her hair, picked up a hoe and followed her parents into the fields. Before the sun was high she would be weeding, carrying water, or minding her younger brother and sisters.

Her name was Mangte Chungneijang, and the world would come to know her as Mary Kom.

Mary was born in the early 1980s in Kangathei, a village in the Churachandpur district of Manipur, in north-east India. She was the eldest child. Her parents were landless farmers who worked fields that belonged to other people. In her autobiography she describes how hard her parents worked, and how there was rarely enough money for anything beyond food and school fees.

As the eldest, Mary worked alongside them from a young age. She cut wood, tended the fields and looked after her siblings. She was small, but strong and quick, and she loved every kind of sport at school, especially athletics.

A boxer from Manipur

In 1998, a boxer from Manipur named Dingko Singh won a gold medal at the Asian Games in Bangkok. All of Manipur celebrated. Mary, then a teenager, watched and felt something new. She later wrote that his win made her believe that someone from a place like hers could become a champion.

She wanted to box.

At that time, very few girls in India boxed at all. Mary went to Imphal, the state capital, to study, and found her way to a boxing coach. She trained hard and learned fast, often more willing to keep going than the boys around her.

There was one problem. She did not tell her father.

The photograph in the newspaper

Her father worried that boxing was dangerous. He feared that a girl who boxed would be hurt, and that her face would be marked and nobody would want to marry her. So for a while, Mary boxed in secret.

Then, in 2000, she won the state boxing championship in Manipur, and her photograph appeared in the newspaper.

Her father saw it. He was upset, and there were difficult conversations at home. But when he understood how much it meant to her, and how good she was, his worry slowly turned into support. In the years that followed, her parents became some of her proudest supporters.

Champion of the world

Mary rose quickly. In 2001 she won a silver medal at the first Women's World Boxing Championships. In 2002 she won gold. She won again in 2005 and in 2006.

In 2005, she married K. Onler Kom, a football player she had met years earlier, who had always encouraged her boxing. In 2007, they had twin sons.

Many people assumed that Mary's boxing career was over. A mother of twins, they said, should stay at home. Mary did not agree, and neither did Onler. He took on much of the care of the babies at home, so that she could go back to the gym.

It was not easy. She had to rebuild her strength and speed almost from the beginning. But in 2008 she won the World Championships again. In 2010 she won a fifth world title. The organisers of world amateur boxing began calling her "Magnificent Mary".

London, 2012

For years, women's boxing was not part of the Olympic Games. That changed in 2012, in London. But there was a difficulty. Mary had won most of her titles in a very light weight class, and the Olympics only had three weight classes for women. To compete, she had to move up to the flyweight division and fight women who were taller and heavier than her.

She trained for it anyway.

In London, she won her way into the semi-finals. She lost there to the British boxer Nicola Adams, who went on to win the gold, but Mary came home with a bronze medal. She was among the first women ever to win an Olympic boxing medal, and the first Indian woman boxer to do so.

Back home, crowds came out to welcome her. The daughter whose boxing had once been kept a secret from her father was now celebrated by the whole country.

Unbreakable

Mary had a third son in 2013. She kept fighting. She won gold at the Asian Games in 2014. In 2018, at the age of thirty-five, she won her sixth world title, more than any other woman in the history of the event.

Along the way, she opened a boxing academy in Manipur to train young boxers, many of them from poor families. She was nominated to India's Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, and received the Padma Vibhushan, one of India's highest civilian honours.

The girl who once worked in other people's fields had carried her family, her state and her country onto the world stage. She did it with two small gloves, and with the quiet backing of a family that learned to believe in her.

Want to read more?

Mary Kom tells her own story, with Dina Serto, in her autobiography Unbreakable. Her Olympic result is listed on Olympics.com, the official site of the International Olympic Committee.