Tina Gramatikova: “Boxing gives me a feeling I have never felt before.”

Tina Gramatikova: “Boxing gives me a feeling I have never felt before.”

The 28-year-old Tina Gramatikova has an incredibly busy schedule. She works. She studies. She fights. An aspiring lawyer. An aspiring fighter who, after only two years in the sport, is dreaming of Commonwealth and Olympic glory.

“I work full time in a legal centre,” Gramatikova told FightPost. “I am in my last year of studying at university, so by the end of the year, I should be a qualified lawyer. I do boxing full-time as well. So it’s a pretty full-on schedule, but it works. I like being on the go. I love the thrill of it. I can’t sit around doing nothing. I have to be doing something. If you want to make something work, you’ll make it work.”       

“I was born here in Australia, but my background is Macedonian, so I’ve had a Balkan upbringing,” Gramatikova relayed to me over Zoom when I enquired about her early years.

Gramatikova told me she had just been informed that she had been selected to represent her country at an upcoming tournament in Colombia. “It will be my first international trip, so I am pretty excited. I still can’t believe how far I have come in two years. I never thought I would make the national team in just two years. It’s a really big thing for me.”

The fleeting introduction to boxing came around ten years ago. “It was around 2015, I was at the gym, and there was a boxing gym next to it,” Gramatikova says of how it all started. “The coach had me in and said, “When are you going to join the real side of things?” I said I would give it a go, and I ended up jumping over and doing a session, and I really liked it. But at that time, I was just keeping fit, doing normal weights and running. I never thought I would get into boxing. I did karate when I was young, when my parents put me into it. I did karate for a year or two. I started boxing for fitness, really, and it was on and off throughout the years until 2021 when I joined a proper boxing gym. I decided to then take it seriously and just have one fight and tick it off the bucket list. But it wasn’t until 2023 that I had my first fight. I had two fights with that coach, and then he shut down that gym. So I had to find another gym, and that’s where I am now, and in two years, I have had nineteen fights. I started winning, and I thought I couldn’t back out now.”

“It makes me so nervous, but it pushes your mental state to a new level,” Gramatikova added
when I asked her what the attraction of her sport is. “There are times when I can’t go anymore, but I end up giving even more. It’s such an amazing feeling. Before a fight, it’s so nerve-wracking, you can’t sleep, and your heart is racing. But when you get ringside, the nerves just go away. It’s the most amazing feeling, I can’t really explain it. You have to be in there to understand. Only people who have stepped inside a ring will fully understand.

“Boxing gives me a feeling I have never felt before. Only this sport has made me feel like this in my life. It’s so addictive, and you’ve got to keep going back for more. I’m pushing myself to see just how far I can go. I want to keep going and see if I can be this person, and then I want to keep going to see if I can go even higher than that. It’s motivational to keep getting better every time.”

Tina Gramatikova is all in. The passion for her craft is obvious. But there is another side to boxing. It is a sport of ridiculous highs and incredible lows. Gramatikova suffered an early setback in her career, a loss that has only made her stronger.

“My second fight was a very tough fight. It was a majority decision, but I lost. But because I experienced that so early in my career, I handle it much better now. When you give everything, but you suffer a defeat, it makes you want to come back even harder. You obviously don’t feel the best, but you go away and readjust to what you did wrong. It’s a learning experience, and you have to take the good and the bad.”

Gramatikova is now nineteen fights in, but she still vividly remembers her very first ring walk. “I was so nervous, I thought I was going to vomit,” Gramatikova told me. “My first fight lasted only 40 seconds; I got a first-round stoppage. I can’t remember too much of it because I just went in there blazing. I remember my chest hurting so much after that first fight. Everyone said it was just the nerves and the adrenaline dump, and everything was just fine. I was super-nervous, and I still get that now. But my strength and conditioning coach said if you don’t get nervous, it means you don’t care.”

Gramatikova obviously does care. She might be relatively new to boxing, but her ambitions are beyond high. Gramatikova told me about the temptations of turning professional and experiencing fighting without a headguard, but her immediate thoughts lie in the unpaid ranks. The Los Angeles Olympic Games in 2028 are a long-term target, but a little trip to Scotland in 2026 is very much on her mind. “I’m looking at the Commonwealth Games next year. That would be a dream come true to compete at that level. I would also like to win a national title in November.”