Boxing isn’t all about body power, it is technical, says Lovlina Borgohain

10/26/2019

22-year-old amateur Indian boxer Lovlina Borgohain said that the sport is more technical than it is about body power, unlike the focus at the youth levels. She further revealed that she was selected to represent her state Assam at the sub-junior level in 2012 purely because of her height.

Since moving out of her village to pursue a boxing career, Lovlina has countered all kinds of struggles to become the top fighter in the 69kg category. But it wasn’t until she came under the training of Sandhya Gurung, an assistant coach with the women’s team, before the Asian Championships in 2017, that she learned to make use of her height and fight from range.

“When you are at the youth level there is less focus on style and technique. You just use your body power but boxing is technical,” Lovlina told Hindustan Times.

It has been seven years since she started her journey, but Lovlina still remembers day one like it was yesterday when she needed to borrow a red-corner kit to compete at the sub-junior nationals.

“I asked one of the girls who had lost her bout if I could borrow hers. She agreed but with a condition that I give her my mobile. You know some incidents in life leave a mark. It still rankles whenever I think of it. Today I have so many boxing dresses and she took away my mobile which was my lifeline then,” Lovlina recalls.

The girl did not maintain her word to lend her kit, but somehow, with bare minimum training and hailing from the Baramukhia in Assam’s Golaghat district only three months prior to the event, she grabbed the gold medal.

“They selected me because I was tall and I was directly selected to represent Assam in sub-junior nationals in 2012 because there are not many boxers to represent the state at that level,” she said.

Today, she is all but certain to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics next year and bear India’s flag in the 69kg category. After all, she has now reached the semi-finals and won the bronze in that weight class two years in a row—2018 and 2019—at the boxing world championships. Along the way, she’d made a friend, another boxer of her age, Jamuna Boro, at the Sports Authority of India’s (SAI) centre in Guwahati.

“Once we were having a late-night party and the warden came, and all the other girls ran away and only we two were caught. We were given a warning and our coaches were informed. We still organised parties secretly,” Lovlina said.

“We have been winning medals together since our sub junior days. We have travelled together, stayed together and won medals in national and international competition. We are feeling very good that we went together for our first major international and returned with medals. It brought back so many memories,” Boro added.

Boro competes in the non-Olympic 54kg category, and also won a bronze, on her debut, at the 2019 Boxing World Championships.