Why boxer Lovlina Borgohain has a real shot at another medal in the 2024 Paris Olympics

The first thing that strikes you about Lovlina Borgohain when you see her up close in training is her sheer physicality. At 5 ft 10, the 75kg boxer is ripped like an action figurine, her long arms and long legs an enviable genetic gift for someone in a combat sport. For her height and weight, she is uncommonly agile. Her move up from 69kg welterweight, in which she won her Tokyo Olympic bronze medal, to 75kg middleweight has had no discernible effect on her speed—which is to say, she is really fast, both her hand speed, as well as her footwork. If anything, the move up has helped the 25-year-old boxer from Assam: 75kg is closer to her normal bodyweight, and keeping it at 69kg meant sacrificing both her natural strength and energy levels.

(Source: Twitter/LovlinaBorgohai)

Training for the Olympics

With the Indian women’s boxing team’s chief coach Bhaskar Bhatt, Lovlina is doing a ring movement drill at the National Institute of Sports in Patiala, Punjab. It’s a simple, but vital game: Bhatt is trying to rush towards Lovlina and close her space. Lovlina’s job is to move away at the last second like a matador (she is in blood-red leggings and a black racer-back top to complete the analogy), while keeping her coach centred as the target of her jab. It’s a joy to watch her move, the swift, assured strides as she circles the ring, the left arm out to keep her opponent at a distance.

This is also Lovlina’s greatest strength. The ability to evade, to jab and move, keep her opponent on the outside. When the opponent, tired of not being able to get within range of her target, makes a desperate lunge, Lovlina unleashes a counter punch to score. It is how she made her way to the Tokyo Olympics semi-finals, and her bronze medal.

Rewatch her quarter-final match at Tokyo against Chinese Taipei’s Chen Nien-Chin, a boxer she had lost to in each of their three previous meetings. In the first round, Lovlina went toe-to-toe, handing the round to Chen. In the second, she began to assert her evasive, counter-punching game, immediately putting Chen at a disadvantage. By the third round, Lovlina was in full control—Chen chased her around the ring, periodically getting rocked by a jab or a hook, landing almost nothing in return.

The semi-final, against the then world champion Busenaz Surmeneli of Turkey, one of the rising powers in women’s amateur boxing, was a rough, gritty showdown. Surmeneli was faster and more aggressive than Chen in blocking Lovlina’s routes, and prevailed. Even shorn of her main weapon, Lovlina showed something invaluable—a big heart. She gave Surmeneli an uncomfortably close run, and she did it all with a smile, showing none of the nerves that come with an Olympic debut, or facing the world champion in the ring.

“I knew I belonged there, in the ring, at that stage,” Lovlina said. “There was no doubt in my head. It is the best experience for me, to be inside the ring. I am most happy there.”

The Olympic bronze was a happy moment, she said, but it was not her target, so she has unfinished business. “My target is an Olympic gold,” she said, laughing like she does with infectious regularity. “I think all the boxers at the national camp will tell you that. It’s everyone’s dream. This is what we are all working for.”

It is this dream that had her shifting from welterweight to middleweight when the former was dropped from the Paris Olympics programme. It is this dream that has her striving to add a new dimension to her game—the ability to fight aggressively from a middle range. Toe-to-toe. Because at 75kg, the height advantage she had at 69kg is mostly nullified. And also because she has more than one facet to her boxing—“So if her main weapon is neutralized, she can pull out her second weapon,” Bhatt said.

The first big test for Lovlina’s new path to Paris 2024 came at the Women’s Boxing World Championships in Delhi in March 2023. She more or less cruised through to the semi-final playing to her usual strength. In the semis, against China’s Qian Li, the Tokyo Olympics silver medallist, Lovlina had to shift strategy. For the first time on the big stage, she was forced to forsake her long range game and go on the attack.

Also read: Didn't have any strategy, just wanted to fight fearlessly: Lovlina Borgohain on historic Olympic win

“We told her you need to attack all the time,” Bhatt said, “and she did it. She attacked with her left hand and her right, attacked moving forward, and attacked on the counter, she threw punches even as she sidestepped…it was her best fight. Where she used to be a counter-attacker, she had turned into an attacker.”

And with this shift came the result she had been waiting for ever since she had burst on to the big stage in 2018. It had been a fiercely speedy ascent—winning a bronze on debut at the 2018 worlds, another bronze at the 2019 worlds, and a bronze at the 2021 Olympics—but it had not produced a title. At the world championships in Delhi, she finally moved up to gold.

“I have always felt a little upset that I could not win a gold, could not hear the national anthem played for me, or the flag raised for me,” Lovlina said, “so this time I was so happy, so proud. The first thing I dreamt of after that win was a gold at the Olympics.”

The dream of an Olympic gold has been with her ever since she started boxing in 2012, right after women’s boxing was finally introduced at the London Olympics, and Mary Kom, the six-time world champion, also became an Olympic medallist.

“Mary didi’s Olympic bronze is what made me think of boxing seriously, made me dream,” Lovlina said.

Lovlina had started her sporting life, following her two elder sisters, with kick-boxing. The girls followed the sport not to make a career out of it, but just because they were strong and full of energy and needed a sporting outlet. There happened to be a kick-boxing school near their village, Baramukhia, in the north-eastern part of Assam. Her father worked as a labourer in a small tea estate and was hardly ever home. Her mother looked after the family’s small farm, where a young Lovlina and her sisters would help her sow paddy. One day at their school, a coach noticed Lovlina’s fighting skills and recommended that she switch to boxing, and try out for a spot at the Sports Authority of India’s (SAI's) Guwahati centre. If she got in, SAI would take care of all her expenses—schooling, food, boarding, and sports equipment.

“My family was poor,” Lovlina said. “We struggled even to have nutritious food at home, so this was a big thing for us. When we were still thinking about it, because my parents were obviously anxious that I would have to leave home at such a young age and go away to a hostel, my father came back with sweets wrapped in a newspaper. When he opened the wrapping, there was an article on Muhammad Ali. That’s when we decided, ok, let’s do boxing!”

It has been a great journey so far for Lovlina, and she believes that a lot is yet to come, starting with the Asian Games in September, an Olympic qualifying event, and then the Paris Olympics next year.

“She has a lot of work to do,” Bhatt said, “and we have the time to do it. Our main aim is to bring aggressiveness to her game. Her athleticism is a great starting point, as is the sharpness of her punch. Her left straight punch and hook she can pull out of nowhere in any situation, now she needs to learn how to do the same thing with her right.”

Lovlina thrives on this work, grinning through practice sessions, including heavy-duty sparring. Whether she is landing punches or absorbing them, the smile remains in place.

“I am doing what I love,” she said, laughing, flashing the tattoo of Olympic rings on her left forearm that reminds her of her goal. “I think that this day is here now and I need to live it happily, otherwise I will miss it later. This is the good life for me.”