Cecilia Brækhus was told women couldn’t enter boxing gyms. She still became an undisputed champion despite a ban on the sport

By George Ramsay, CNN

(CNN) — 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 of Norway – a country with an historic aversion to pugilism.

Professional boxing had been illegal since 1981, yet that didn’t stop Brækhus from falling in love with combat sports. As a teenager, she would sneak out of her parents’ home to practice kickboxing at a local gym before stepping into the ranks of amateur boxing.

At the time, most female fighters had little-to-no footprint in the sport, which was geared overwhelmingly towards men. This, coupled with a professional ban in her home country, meant that a boxing career seemed almost unthinkable for someone like Brækhus, even after becoming European champion and a world silver medalist. But she remained undeterred.

“This was before girls could go to the Olympics (for boxing),” Brækhus explains about the start of her professional career. “This was before the #MeToo movement. And this was when there were still boxing gyms that didn’t allow women.

“I was literally told, ‘Hey, women are not allowed in the gym,’ and there were male coaches that didn’t want to train women. That was the kind of environment. I said I was going to be a boxing star, a boxing champion and world champion. I did get a lot of sh*t for that, and that kind of drove me.”

Unable to pursue a professional career in Norway, Brækhus instead moved to Germany. There, she earned the nickname of “First Lady” as the first female fighter to sign with German promotor Wilfried Sauerland, sowing the seeds for her long and impressive career.

The high point came in September 2014, when Brækhus defeated Croatian Ivana Habazin to add the IBF welterweight title to her WBA, WBC, and WBO belts – becoming the first woman in any weight division to be recognized as an undisputed champion.

“It’s hard to find a unified champion, male or female, that doesn’t have an influence on a whole generation,” Brækhus’ long-time trainer, Johnathon Banks, tells CNN Sports.

“But she had such a big influence, because once all these girls found out … they don’t want to just be world champions, they want to be undisputed; it means more, it sounds better. And it all came from this little girl fighting out of Norway.”

Around the same time, Brækhus had been waging a separate battle back home. In between her training in Germany, she would fly back to Norway to speak with doctors, health specialists, politicians, and even the prime minister in an attempt to get the professional ban overturned.

“There was a very, very big stigma (around boxing), and you’re also a criminal in Norway, so it was very hard to get sponsorship, it was hard to get recognition,” says Brækhus.

“And when you’re doing this sport, we actually could go to jail if you were to do that in Norway, so I just wanted to take away that stigma. And I wanted to introduce the sport to Norwegians.”

In December 2014, Brækhus’ efforts paid off. The Norwegian parliament voted to lift its ban on professional boxing, which had been punishable with up to three months in jail, by a slim majority of 54 to 48. The moment felt unlike any other victory in Brækhus’ career.

“When you’re a world champion, that’s just me, me, me, me. I’m world champion, I’m the best – ego, ego,” she says. “Other stuff, like taking down the ban, this is something that will have an enormous impact for a lot of people and for many, many years to come.”

The lifting of the ban in Norway is just one sweeping change that Brækhus has witnessed in her long career.

In 2012, she saw women boxers compete at the Olympics for the first time, then in 2018 took part in the first female boxing match to air on HBO in the network’s 45-year history, defeating American Kali Reis by unanimous decision.

That resulted in Brækhus defending her undisputed title, just one stop in her record-breaking reign of five years and 337 days as a four-belt champion. It was only in 2020 that her streak of 25 title defenses – matching former heavyweight champion Joe Louis’ record – came to a surprising end against Jessica McCaskill.

Brækhus has been flirting with retirement ever since her first loss to McCaskill, but now, finally, feels ready to step away. She leaves women’s boxing in far better health than when she started, and is heartened that “girls – seven, eight years old – are empowered to start doing boxing training.”

But more progress, Brækhus believes, still needs to be made. By way of example, she points to an incident at a recent press conference in Norway when a journalist asked her if she was a lesbian.

“You have to understand that there are still things that women athletes have to deal with that a male athlete never will have to deal with – ever,” says Brækhus. “It wouldn’t even like cross their minds … I feel like we have to be twice, thrice as good as the men to get the same recognition, to get the same pay, to get the same opportunities.”

Her parting message to the powers-that-be in boxing is to “invest in girls – because we’ve proven over and over again that we sell tickets, we entertain, we’re drawing crowds.”

Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano have been at the forefront of this surging popularity, becoming the first two women to headline at Madison Square Garden in 2022 before facing off again as the co-main event to Mike Tyson and Jake Paul last year.

Brækhus has also seen her share of sellout stadiums, most famously when a crowd of 10,000 in Oslo watched her defeat Anne Sophie Mathis in her first professional bout on Norwegian soil nine years ago.

Another packed-out crowd is expected for the final fight of her career against Kozin in Lillestrøm on Saturday, with Brækhus holding few, if any, regrets as she walks into the ring one last time.

“I think it’s just time,” says Brækhus. “I want to stop at the top. I don’t want to go out with any injuries. I don’t want to look back and say, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t have done that last fight, both physically and mentally.’

“The worst thing, I think, is when the lights turn off and you suddenly don’t have anything to do,” she adds. “So I’m going to stay very active outside of boxing.”

At first, Brækhus wants to distance herself from the sport – “like when you have broken up in a relationship, stay away a little bit and then become friends,” she explains – and intends to focus on writing, speaking engagements, TV appearances and charity work.

She anticipates traveling for work but wants her base to be in Norway. It seems fitting that she will end her career by fighting in her adopted home, more than a decade after she was so instrumental in professional boxing’s legalization in the country. In front of a home crowd, the “First Lady” is awaiting her final bell.

“She was able to fight and get something better for herself in boxing, which to me is beautiful,” says Banks. “Although she had to go next door to Germany to get it, she came back and brought it back home.

“That’s her biggest win. Her biggest win is she brought it back home.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.