SHE was boxing for money. Even at 13 years old, she knew that.
Why else, said Janjaem Suwannapheng, would she commit to a sport in which a boy smashed her nose in, back when she was shorter than the stalks of rice in the fields near home?
“Anyone who becomes a boxer does it because they come from a poor background,” she said.
“It hurts, it’s tiring, it’s exhausting.”
Janjaem Suwannapheng in action against Imane Khelif of Algeria during the Paris Olympics. The Thai boxer won a bronze. — Reuters
Of course, Janjaem is really good at boxing. She was the first girl to train at her local gym in Thailand’s rural north-east. She loves the sport now, she said.
At last year’s world championships, she won a silver medal in her welterweight division (66 kg, about 145 pounds). At the Paris Olympics, she won the bronze after being stopped in the semi-finals by Algeria’s Imane Khelifi who went on to win the gold.
Janjaem said, boxing has already saved her. Now 24, she has bought land and gold for her parents and a pickup truck for herself.
She scored an athletic scholarship to a university. Her older brother, by contrast, left school at 15 to work with their father, a truck driver.
Chaichana Saengngoen, 16, trains at a gym near Bangkok that produces champions in muay Thai. Many Thai Olympic boxers started off in muay Thai. — NYT
Boxing is a national passion in Thailand, where the confluence of hardscrabble living and a fondness for illegal gambling – on anything from cockfighting and buffalo racing to a fin-snapping standoff between Siamese fighting fish – has made the sport tremendously lucrative.
The local variety, Muay Thai, or Thai boxing, relies on lightning strikes with legs, knees, elbows and fists first honed by ancient warriors dedicated to the “way of the eight limbs.”
By winning bouts, Thai prisoners can earn early release, as one flyweight boxer who competed in the 2008 Beijing Olympics did after his sentence for robbery was commuted.
Thailand’s impoverished north-east, known as Isaan, cultivates the majority of the country’s boxers. The region’s labour force is scattered around the country and the world because there aren’t enough jobs back home.
Children warm up with a run before a training session. Kids at the muay Thai gym run six miles twice a day, before they begin their boxing workouts. — NYT
“From working in the fields, from working in the sun, we get the fighting spirit,” said Thananya Somnuek, who started boxing as a young teenager in Isaan.
Thananya won a national championship at 16 and later a gold medal at the Youth Olympic Games.
Her nickname in Thai is Butter, because her mother had a premonition that her daughter would one day go to a foreign country where people ate such foreign ingredients.
One of Thananya’s boxing squad teammates, another Isaan native, is nicknamed Cream. Both Butter and Cream made it to Paris.
Officially, children in Thailand can enter the Muay Thai ring at age 10. If they are healthy, they can box for money every 21 days.
But in Isaan, locals say, standards are more lax. As long as farmhands aren’t needed for the harvest, children can fight every 10 days.
“The strict rules are made by air-conditi
An advertisement for muay Thai is seen in Bangkok. Boxing is a national passion in Thailand, offering a path to the Olympics and lucrative careers in a country with one of the world’s widest income divides. — NYToned men sitting in air-conditioned rooms,” said Suthep Saengngoen, as he sat in his family’s sweltering Muay Thai gym, rubbing his grandson’s body with a cooling mentholated liniment. His six sons all fought, too.
The family is from Isaan, but the gym is in the outskirts of Bangkok, amid industrial warehouses and scraggly fruit farms.
Boxing purses in the Thai capital are at least triple those back home.
The children at the gym train from 5am to 7am, before going to school. Then they return for afternoon practice until the mosquitoes start swarming at dusk.
That’s not counting 10km (6.2 miles) of running twice a day to build stamina. By the end of the day, their young arms shiver from smacking the bag – and each other – hundreds of times.
Hundreds of roundhouse kicks leave their legs quaking, too. Still, they return for more.
Nutthapol Anuphap, 10, has been boxing since he was three, he said. At five years old, he appeared on a local TV talent show.
One of his Muay Thai videos has nearly 2 million views. His nickname is Fist.
“I’m going to be rich,” he said.
At the Chaiya District Prison in southern Thailand, in a concrete yard flanked by razor wire, a group of inmates heaved, kicked and punched in the searing heat. One lifted a cement-filled bucket with his teeth, strengthening his jaw and neck with each 10kg rep.
Out of the more than 900 inmates at Chaiya, 15 men and five women have qualified for a prison Muay Thai programme, one of 10 in the country.
They train for eight hours a day and receive extra rations of eggs, meat and milk.
The fighters can keep their prize money, and prison officials allow them occasional perks such as KFC spicy chicken wings, a local favourite.
Successful bouts at local stadiums, which they attend with prison officials in tow, count as good behaviour in parole hearings.
Jomyud Sowangchompu, 21, was sentenced to four years in prison for drug dealing and possession. He left school in sixth grade and could only find a job making less than US$15 (RM66) a week during the fruit harvesting season, he said.
In a town match in June, he lost in the first round. Still, he earned US$55 (RM245) for fighting, enough to pay for months of prison necessities: soap, toothpaste, laundry detergent and haircuts.
“I don’t have to ask my parents for money,” he said. “It makes me feel like a better man.” — NYT
