People don’t believe Niamh Mitchell when she tells them she’s a boxer. <\/p>\n
After all, the 19-year-old Fifer doesn’t look like someone who spends her life being thumped in the face.<\/p>\n
“‘People don’t believe I’m a boxer. Some of them think it’s white-collar stuff… but there is a way of proving it, obviously,” she tells BBC Sport Scotland with a glint in her eye. “I now just tell them to search my name.”<\/p>\n
If anyone does, they would discover a fighter of some promise.<\/p>\n
Mitchell became Scotland’s first major female gold medal-winner at the European Junior Championships in 2022, and recently claimed her country’s first senior female international gold in Hungary.<\/p>\n
And now she has been confirmed as one of 11 Team Scotland boxers competing at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow later this summer.<\/p>\n
Mitchell’s target? Gold in the 60-65kg welterweight category. So much so, that she’s already seen herself on the podium and heard the anthem playing.<\/p>\n
“I’m a total manifester,” she says. “I love manifesting stuff to happen. I did the exact same with the Euros and I won that, so I believe in that stuff. Just me with a gold medal, on top of the podium, my home crowd, anthem playing…<\/p>\n
“A gold medal is the aim because I’ve had a really strong start to the year, so I don’t think it’s out of reach at all.”<\/p>\n
It’s all a long way from the five-year-old who took up kick-boxing in Rosyth as a way to dissuade some “nasty kids” who were giving her grief. <\/p>\n
Mitchell suggests she “used it once” and didn’t need to again, but by the time she became a teenager her attentions had switched to boxing at Bowhill Miners. <\/p>\n
By 14, she was representing Scotland and now, five years on, she’s watching Commonwealth Games opening ceremony clips online and “totally psyching myself up” for what’s to come in Glasgow. <\/p>\n
“It’s a good buzz, not a nervous buzz,” says Mitchell, who commutes from Fife to Glasgow each day to train. “It all kind of hit me when I was trying on the kit and stuff. I’m just going to go there and enjoy it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People don’t believe Niamh Mitchell when she tells them she’s a boxer. After all, the 19-year-old Fifer doesn’t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":630482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-630481","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\/630481","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=630481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=630481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=630481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=630481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}