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Cecilia Brækhus embarked on her against-the-odds career in professional boxing almost two decades ago, and she’s hardly stopped fighting before or since.
Along the way, her opponents have been many and varied, from world champions in the ring to a professional boxing ban in her native country and those who believed that women had no place in the sport at all.
Now, at the age of 43, Brækhus is ready to hang up her gloves, her far-reaching legacy already etched into boxing’s history books as the first-ever undisputed women’s world champion.
But to have experienced such success during your career only makes it harder to say goodbye. Ahead of her final fight against Slovenian Ema Kozin on Saturday, Brækhus has been coming to terms with the pain and finality of her retirement from boxing.
“This has kind of like been my whole life, and I love it,” she tells CNN Sports. “It’s going to be very sad; it’s going to be hard; it’s going to be like a heartbreak.”
Boxing is no stranger to underdog tales, to seeing fighters rise from obscurity and hardship to reach the very top of the sport. But no champion in history has had a journey quite like Brækhus.
Born in Colombia and orphaned from a young age, she was brought up in her adopted home
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