Julie Ramadan: “I have never missed a day of training. I love boxing so much.”

Julie Ramadan: “I have never missed a day of training. I love boxing so much.”

It was a somewhat jet-lagged Julie Ramadan I found over Zoom. An overseas trip to Belgium, representing her country, was still in her body. The long flight home and that brutal time difference were still lingering.

It was a day removed from her 20th birthday. Born in Melbourne, Ramadan was always destined to have a life in sports. She was pushed into many different avenues of the sporting landscape. But boxing was perhaps always her one true love. But for her family, that love for her sport took a little longer to reciprocate.

“My parents were very sceptical about a female boxing and competing,” Ramadan told me. “Getting hit in the head, injuries and whatnot, it just wasn’t normalised for them as they were very traditional ethnic parents who emigrated from Lebanon to live in Australia for a better life. They did try to talk me out of it a few times, but I was so in love with the sport I was willing to make any sacrifice I needed to, which I always did. I never went to any birthdays or parties, never drank or smoked, and was always in the gym morning and night every day of the week. If I weren’t in the gym, I’d be studying fights. Regardless, though, they still supported me and continued to do so, as well as the rest of my family.”

It was an extremely early taste of the Noble Art for Ramadan. “I started boxing when I was 6 years old. I have just turned 20, so I have been doing it for about 14 years now.”

Boxing was seemingly something Julie Ramadan was born to do. Her brother was dabbling in the sport. But despite that gentle persuasion from her parents to go a different route, Ramadan stood firm.

“My family tried to make do a bunch of different sports,” Ramadan relayed to FightPost. “But I was like, I want to do boxing. I don’t know exactly what it was that made me choose boxing. I used to love watching the fights on my phone, so I think that pushed me into doing it myself when I was a kid. My brother was doing it, so he used to influence me. He would come home, and whatever he had learned at the gym, he would teach me on the pads. I wanted to learn more. But he wanted to make sure I really wanted to do it, so he put me into five other sports before he put me into boxing. I did so many sports as a kid. I did tennis, swimming, gymnastics, dance, and I tried soccer. I just thought this was boring. I just wanted to fight. I was too young to box at first; I had to wait until I was 10 years old. I was training myself until I was able to start doing classes. Ever since then, I have never missed a day of training. I love boxing so much.”

“Maybe it was the adrenaline,” Ramadan added when I pressed her on what boxing gave her that the other sports didn’t. “Maybe it was the high. It was just something that got me excited. I just love it. It is such a unique sport. People think it is just hitting someone in the face. But there is so much IQ. I like a fast sport, and maybe it was the adrenaline rush and the discipline.”

Ramadan is now around forty fights into her boxing career. Three State titles and a two-time National Champion clearly indicate her talent. But thoughts of her very first ring walk in 2021 are still fresh in her mind.

“I had my first fight during Covid times,” Ramadan told me. “It was difficult to get a fight, especially because I was a big kid. I was over 70 kgs, so I had to lose some weight. There was nobody at that weight in Australia to fight me. I was really big. So I had an incentive from my coach, he said, get to 65 and we’ll get you a fight. I followed a plan so strictly, and I made it. There were times when I would get a fight, and then we would go back in a wave of Covid. We had to wait to get out of a wave, and then we would go back into another one. It was really bad in Australia, especially in Victoria. We went into lockdown the most of any States in Australia. But eventually,y I had my first fight, and I won it. It was so much fun. I loved it. It gave me even more motivation to lose even more weight. I was still quite heavy. I lost more weight, and here I am.”

The World Amateur Championships will take place in Liverpool in September, and Ramadan is determined to be there. A fighter with very big ambitions.

“This year, I want to qualify for the World Championships in Liverpool later this year. After that, I want to make the Commonwealth Games in 2026. I want to focus then on winning gold medals overseas in International tournaments, and the year after that, try and qualify for the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028. As a professional, I’ve always wanted to be a world champion. I want to win that WBC belt. As an amateur, I have always wanted to be an Olympian and go to the Olympics.”

At 20, Julie Ramadan is only at the beginning of her boxing journey. But she is aiming high for that boxing life. Ramadan says she is locked in for her immediate future. The focus is on making it to Liverpool later this year, and trips to Glasgow and Los Angeles after that. After resisting other sports that didn’t satisfy. It would appear that Ramadan has chosen exceedingly well.