Former WBC super-bantamweight world champion Fatuma Zarika has revealed plans to return to Europe for one final push at a world title before she retires from professional boxing.
The 41-year-old Kenyan, nicknamed “Iron Fist”, has indicated she wants to hang up her gloves while still at the top of the sport, rather than fade out after a series of setbacks in recent years.
Zarika stretched her professional record to 52 fights with a knockout victory over Tanzania’s Flora Machela on a card in Nairobi, battering her opponent with a couple of knockdowns before finishing the job with two minutes remaining in the eighth and final round. The win has clearly reignited her ambitions.
Her stated dream now is to win a world title once more before calling it quits, and to get there she wants to fall back on the formula that carried her through her title-winning years: a training camp in Europe, based at some of the best-equipped gymnasiums in the world, the same set-up she used while defending her WBC crown multiple times
Zarika’s career has already secured her a place in boxing history. In October 2016 she became the first Kenyan to win a WBC title, defeating American Alicia Ashley on a split decision in Flint, Michigan, to claim the WBC female super-bantamweight belt and, in doing so, became the first African woman ever to hold one. She went on to hold that title until 2019.
She is realistic about the gulf between the champion who won in Michigan a decade ago and the fighter she is today. “I will need to be in tip-top shape to challenge for the world title. I may not be in the best shape like when I won the world title, but it’s something that I can regain with good training,” she said. “The beauty of it is that my body appreciates pretty fast with good training.”
Zarika’s comeback plans arrive alongside another grievance she has yet to see resolved. She has continued pursuing a long-overdue rematch for the Commonwealth Boxing Council super-featherweight title against Britain’s Kirsty Hill.
More than two years after losing the belt to the Englishwoman in a fight she has always felt was decided unfairly.
Zarika says even the CBC’s own president admitted afterwards that she had not lost fairly, yet no rematch has ever been arranged.
Whether that rematch materialises first, or Zarika heads straight back to a European training base to chase a world title shot, the boxer has made her intentions plain: one last run at the top, on her own terms, before she walks away from the ring for good.
