A Cambridge University graduate who was born in Nottingham and now lives and trains in China, Boutell first moved to Beijing as a teenager to live with her father after what she describes as a difficult adolescence in the UK.<\/p>\n
“Like a lot of kids, I wasn’t sure about my place in the world and I used to act out a lot,” she told BBC World Service’s More Than The Score podcast on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“Looking back, I was just under-stimulated. I didn’t find school challenging and I had lots of excess energy that ended up in not great behaviour.”<\/p>\n
Bouttell says her “behaviour problems disappeared”, though she admits she still longed for familiar comforts. “I missed Greggs,” she adds.<\/p>\n
Her love of the Chinese language earned her a place at Cambridge, where she initially focused on powerlifting before discovering boxing in her final year.<\/p>\n
After graduating, Boutell returned to China to teach English and settled in Shanghai. There, she met the coach who now trains her professionally and entered white-collar boxing.<\/p>\n
Bouttell turned professional and has fought seven times in China and once in Thailand.<\/p>\n
Having only competed a handful of times in the UK as an amateur, Bouttell is looking forward to her “homecoming” bout.<\/p>\n
“This will be the first fight my family have seen,” she says. “My brothers will be able to watch me fight for the first time.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Cambridge University graduate who was born in Nottingham and now lives and trains in China, Boutell first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399185,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-399667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}