Nigeria’s rising boxing star Patricia Mbata: Inspired by Anthony Joshua, ready to leave her own mark

Patricia Mbata is a rising African female boxing star who has only been punching competitively for four years.

The Nigerian never even dreamed of boxing in college.

She still has a lot to learn about the sport, but her comfortable and rangy punches have helped her rise to the top of Europe's biggest amateur boxing event and become one of Africa's best.

And she’s just getting started.

Mbata discovered her love for boxing in her 20s and was relieved to be in a sport she ‘truly enjoys’, surrounded by people she greatly admired.

“I see myself as someone that is trying to do something different, and just trying to inspire a change. I feel as if I bring something different to the sport,” she says in an interview with Olympics.com from London, as she intensifies her training for only her second-ever tournament as a Nigerian boxer.

Mbata, a British-born boxer of Nigerian descent, goes on to draw parallels between her motivation and that of Olympic gold medallist Anthony Joshua.

“We started off at the same club. And it's just very inspiring because, you've got someone that started at the same like pretty much any other boxer, but he's just excelled, his career throughout amateurs and the pro game. And you can kind of see a path as to where your journey could be.”

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Patricia Mbata: Channelling her inner Anthony Joshua

When Patricia Mbata decided to try a new sport, she surprisingly chose boxing.

Despite never having boxed before, she had heard a lot of good things about the sport and was excited to pursue something she may not be cut out for but had chosen for herself.

“Boxing wasn't even in my vocabulary when I was young,” she admits in the chat with Olympics.com.

“It was athletics, it was football, it was netball. It was all the sports that you would do more so in school that were more common.”

Even her mum couldn’t understand why her daughter, a project manager in a construction company, would choose boxing as a hobby, but there was no turning back.

Mbata had decided to give boxing a go and finally settled on the nearest gym in her neighbourhood, Finchley, unaware of the club’s rich sporting history.

"In boxing, you've got a rainbow of people in every gym. You've got different religions, colours, you've got like coaches, and it's just a beautiful rainbow. Everyone speaks the same language and that's boxing,” she explains, describing the attraction she felt towards the sport.

It wasn't just about honing her defensive and punching skills, but also her mental aspect.

“There are just so many benefits to this sport. Mentally, it just gives you so much confidence. It just releases like whatever it is, all the tension, the stress. Even when you're just punching the bag, you're not even sparring. You just feel so filled, and you just feel like you just got a weight off your shoulder.”

The boxing gym in Barnet, in the northern outskirts of London, is where British superstar Joshua began his amateur career.

“We're always having conversations when I see him, and he's always just saying, ‘just do it, just do it’. And I feel as if I have that same philosophy of life. My mentality and my ethos and what I believe in is very similar to what Josh (Anthony Joshua) advises people - ‘just do it’.

“I can just personally say he's a really lovely person,” she says of Joshua, who occasionally returns to his old gym where he trained as a teenager to support up-and-coming boxers like Mbata.

Patricia Mbata: This is where I belong

The 28-year-old won all her bouts at the 2023 Haringey Box Cup in June and left the Alexandra Palace in London with the gold medal.

The annual event attracts elite boxer from across Europe, the USA and Canada, and it was the stage that shaped the amateur careers of British Olympic champions Anthony Joshua, Nicola Adams, Katie Taylor, among others.

Mbata’s victory cemented her position as one of the middleweight boxers to watch in England and beyond, marking a seminal moment in her short boxing career.

The Nigerian Boxing Federation invited her to fight for the national team, and it was a dream come true.

“Having that conversation was just beautiful. And for me, it's just showing this is where I am. This is where I should be, and this is where I belong,” she says.

Mbata backed her unexpected win with an African silver, just falling short tob Rady Adosinda Gramane from Mozambique.

That performance fired up another long-term desire, becoming Nigeria’s second woman to qualify for the Olympics since Edith Ogoke at London 2012.

“You have to do things that almost seem impossible because you never know where you're going to end up. You just have to push, if you've got a love for something so much, and you believe in it, and it's in your spirit, and you dream about it every single day, you are right to just pursue that dream.”

“I feel as if that's what I'm doing with boxing, because now we're talking about Olympic qualifiers, we're talking about that Olympic stage.”

As a place in history beckons, her self-belief is indisputable.

“I just knew I was going to be in the Olympics. I thought it might be athletics, maybe it could be another sport. But I just had that dream of being on the Olympic stage. I believe, and I know I'm going to get there, so we just got to keep pushing. I don't want to get too philosophical or too emotional about it, but I just feel as if being on that stage is where I belong.”

Patricia Mbata on why this is just the beginning

Despite not rising to the top in the usual way, Mbata's boxing has grown from strength to strength since her first documented amateur bout in late 2019.

The middleweight contestant is a confident entertainer in the ring, very relaxed with a loose boxing style. She likes to dictate the pace before releasing some wounding punches, an approach picked from her coaches at Finchley, Sean Murphy and Gary Foley, as well as other seasoned boxers she’s interacted with.

“There’s a coach in England, his name is Eman (Emmanuel Izonritei), he used to box for Nigeria and then moved to England. He has a very interesting philosophy on boxing. It can be quite controversial because he always says, ‘let's play boxing!’. Boxing is not a sport that you would consider something that you'd play out because it's so dangerous.”

“What he means is when you're in that ring, and you are confident, and you're just doing what you love and doing what you enjoy, it brings the best out of you.

“I personally understand what he means, because when I'm relaxed, and I'm enjoying, and I'm playing, and I'm picking my opponent off,” Mbata explains as she mimics her hand motions to perform jabs and hooks in the ring.

At the African Boxing Qualifiers in Dakar, she looked pretty comfortable in her competitive weight division, the under 75kg, that was dominated and won by Morocco’s experienced two-time Olympian Khadija Mardi, who qualified top of the class as she did ahead of the Tokyo Games. Mbata reached the semi-finals in Dakar.

But Mbata is optimistic that her punches are filled with possibilities that African female boxing is yet to experience.

"So it's a good combination of having that power and that strength, but also having that boxing IQ. You know, I'm not just going in there to take someone's head, but you're doing it strategically.”

“I want to get out of here. I need to put in the hard work, no matter how it takes, no matter what it takes. And this is the fight game. We're in this fight. We're not ballerinas. We're here fighting for our lives. We're fighting for our future.”

Paris 2024 Olympic qualification is crucial, but Mbata has a higher overarching mission.

“It’s just such a massive and a massive platform to be on to inspire boxes, especially in Nigeria, because there's still a lot of work to be done in Africa as a whole in terms of opening up those opportunities and having those facilities and knowing there are opportunities to even get onto,” she reckons.

“There is also a stigma attached to boxing and having a hard life. I'm not saying that I've had an easy life in any stretch of the imagination, but there is always a stigma saying that boxers have come from some kind of diversity or trying to fight their way out of something. You don't have to do it [box] because your life depends on it. And that's something that I feel as if I could share with the world.”