NINE years ago, Chantelle Reid was told she could be paralysed for life if she didn’t quit boxing.
Instead, Reid went from measuring her punches to calculating mortgages.
But now she is in Paris with just one thought in her mind: GOLD.
Middleweight ace Reid, 26, recalled how her promising youth career had been sent into a full stop by a shock diagnosis that she simply did not want to accept.
Reid said: “In 2015 I’d just come back from the world youth championships in China, where I got to the semi-finals after a four-week intense training camp.
“Looking back, I was young and my body wasn’t really developed.
“It was a really hard camp and when I got home I started to have real problems with my back.
“I had a scan to see what it might be and the specialist looked at the results and told me I had serious degeneration of the discs in the lower part of my spine.
“Basically he said I’d end up in a wheelchair and wouldn’t be able to walk if it got any worse.
“I didn’t want to believe him. When he said that I turned to him and said: “No, that’s not true. I can box. I’ve just got back from China.”
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“But I then had two more specialists look at the results – and they all said the same thing.
“That was when I realised how serious it was and I just stopped boxing. That was so hard because it was all I’d ever wanted to do.”
It meant a forced career change, with Reid heading into home town Derby to work as a mortgage advisor – although she kept up a part-time role in her father’s gym.
She admitted: “I had to do something else.
“I worked as a mortgage advisor for a few years but I never really enjoyed that nine to five office life.
“At the time I was still helping out with the gyms my dad and grand-dad ran in Derby, helping with classes.
“That was good for me because it brought back the adrenaline rush I had as a boxer.
“If you’d said to me even two years ago that I’d be in Paris I would’ve laughed. I wasn’t even boxing then and I just wouldn’t have believed it.
“But about 18 months ago I was talking to my dad about what I might do and I told him ‘I’m not in pain anymore’ and explained that I’d started training to ease myself back.
“At the start of it I just wanted to get back in the ring, not to box internationally.
“It was about that feeling of being a boxer, everything that came with that.
“But it went so well that in January 2023 I decided I felt good enough to enter the national championships.
“I won them, was invited to do the England team assessment off the back of that and then the GB assessment and in October I was invited on to the programme full-time.
“A few months later Rob McCracken told me he wanted me to enter the Olympic qualifiers – I qualified in February and here we are.
“I never expected any of this.
“But now I feel so good and there is just one thing in my kind – that I am going to come back with a medal, 100 per cent, and I want gold.
“I just can’t wait for the chance to walk out in that arena and to be able to say ‘I’m an Olympian’.
“Stepping foot in that ring will mean everything to me. I couldn’t ask for more.”
