LONDON — Gloria Peek has yet to land a punch at the 2012 London Games, the first Olympics to include women’s boxing as a sport.
But at 62 years old, she has struck the blow of a lifetime.
There she was inside the ring at London’s Excel center on Wednesday, plying the sweat-drenched face of 17-year-old Claressa Shields with water and dispensing tactical adjustments that helped the gifted middleweight to a resounding 29-15 victory.
The only woman on the U.S. Olympic boxing team’s coaching staff, Peek will be in Shields’s corner when the high school junior from Flint, Mich., fights Russia’s Nadezda Torlopova on Thursday for an historic gold.
In a sense, Peek has been in the corners of all 36 women boxers at the 2012 Olympics — women from China, Kazakhstan, Tunisia, Brazil and beyond — having devoted her life’s work to a sport she believes offers as much to women as it has for centuries to men.
“It develops you mentally; it develops you physically. It gives you the skills necessary to be successful in all walks of life,” said Peek, who runs Team Norfolk Boxing Club in Virginia. “Boxing is also a warrior sport. It’s the last great domain of men, reserved for men and only men. And we’ve broken into it.”
Female boxers around the world rejoiced when the International Olympic Committee announced in 2009 it would add women’s boxing for the 2012 London Games.
On Wednesday, the history-making female boxers struggled to describe what it meant to compete for a medal in front of a flag-waving, ear-splitting, foot-stomping capacity crowd of 10,000.
With Prime Minister David Cameron in attendance, Wednesday’s Olympic boxing card opened with a tribute to the pioneer of women’s boxing, “Battling” Barbara Buttrick. And when the diminutive Buttrick, now 82, was introduced, it was plain to see why the Yorkshire native was known as “The Mighty Atom of the Ring” decades ago, when she toured Europe boxing in carnivals and taking on men in exhibitions despite her 4-foot-11, 98-pound frame.
In a brocade jacket and black slacks, Buttrick recounted the derision she encountered. “Girls shouldn’t fight! Girls shouldn’t do this! Girls shouldn’t do that!” she mocked. And she drew applause when she told the crowd that last year, nearly a half-century after the fact, she received an apology from London’s Daily Mirror for the mean things it had written about her.
Irish lightweight Katie Taylor, a four-time world champion, had the loudest cheering section, with seemingly all of Ireland on hand for her 17-9 triumph.
“I think I am in heaven right now,” said Taylor, Ireland’s most revered female athlete, who competes for the national soccer team and plays Gaelic football, as well.
The jubilant Irish press corps was in heaven, too, with one scribe braying, “We have always punched above our weight!”
Women’s boxing hasn’t exactly been embraced in the United States.
It took a lawsuit to force USA Boxing, the sport’s governing body, to lift its ban on women’s boxing in 1993 — 21 years after the passage of Title IX, the landmark legislation mandating equal opportunity for both genders in schools receiving federal funds.
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