Stephanie Mavromatis: “Boxing is my release. It’s my outlet. It’s my sanity, if you like.”

Stephanie Mavromatis: “Boxing is my release. It’s my outlet. It’s my sanity, if you like.”

Defence is a large part of the life of Stephanie Mavromatis. By day, Mavromatis defends her clients in a courtroom. By night, she defends herself in a boxing ring.

The 36-year-old is a defence solicitor. A day job that takes up so much of her time. But the London-born legal guru finds time to fight on the white-collar circuit. “I have been working in law for about seven years now,” Mavromatis told me over Zoom. “I am on the defence side. The dark side, as they say.”

Mavromatis has been in boxing for over a decade now. “I started in boxing by doing one of those ultra-white-collar fights about ten years ago. I had given birth to two kids, both under two years of age. I had put on some weight. I had always loved boxing. Always loved watching boxing. They had brought out this new thing, train for eight weeks, get fit, and have a fight at the end of it. I thought, great, that will be fun. Go in the ring and have that experience. I did the eight weeks of training. It was much harder than I thought it would be.”

“It was fun, and it wasn’t,” Mavromatis added. “When you go into that type of training, and you go into it completely new to it, it is quite difficult to adjust to that kind of cardio. In hindsight, with what I know now, nobody should do that if they have no background in boxing. You don’t learn enough, and I think it’s quite dangerous putting people in there without the full experience of the basics.”

Stephanie Mavromatis won on her first-ever taste of ring action, and what was initially a one-and-done deal turned into something more. “I won, and I said I would never do that again. I was so exhausted at the end of it, but two weeks later, I found myself back in a boxing ring, and I continued the training, and I am still going.”

After starting out on the white-collar circuit, for context, world champions like Fabio Wardley and Rhiannon Dixon began their careers away from the more accepted boxing world. Mavromatis did try her hand as an amateur, but the experience left a bitter taste.

“I am still on the white-collar circuit,” Mavromatis relayed to me. “I went into the amateurs and had one fight a few years ago. In my opinion, we got such a terrible decision, and it really put me off. I have been around the sport for a long time, and I know a lot of people, and I have heard the stories of favouritism. With the fact that I am an older female, and with my job, did I really want to put myself through all that training, and then get another poor decision, and not even get started? So after a lot of consideration, I just went back into the white-collar scene. At least I can then train, have a good fight, and I know the decisions will be fair. I know that might not be the case in every white-collar fight, but in my experience, I have had very fair decisions and good fights.”

Mavromatis is now eleven fights into her boxing life. “It’s not a lot of fights, but with my career, and I took a break to have another child. I was having only one fight a year, because that’s all I could manage with the workload and the kids. It’s only in the last two years that I have ramped it, and I have now had four fights in a year. I plan to do the same this year. I have switched things around, and I am making boxing more of a priority. I have switched my job role to consultancy, so I am not in the office anymore, which gives me more freedom. The kids are now older, so that means it’s much easier to navigate around them. I am able to do it a lot more full-time than I could before.”

Away from the sweat and grind of her boxing life, the day job is relentless and incredibly time-consuming. “I can get calls throughout the night,” Mavromatis says. “At two in the morning. Or late at night, if a client gets arrested, or if they want a chat, or if they are stressing about their case. A big part of my job is to be there and listen. It’s not easy, but for me, it is sort of the yin to the yang. It kind of counteracts all the stress I pick up in my job. I can let it all out in the gym.”

“Fight camps are hard,” Mavromatis added. “I work all day, and then I have to train at night. I am then training at the weekends. But I love it so much, and I have made it work. I am lucky that I have a supportive family, and even though it is really tiring, it just works.”

Having a stressful day job and a pressure-driven ‘hobby’ ticks many boxes for Mavromatis. “Boxing is my release. It’s my outlet. It’s my sanity, if you like. You can tell by the job I do that I love high-pressure situations. I thrive off that. Boxing is exactly the same. It’s going into the unknown and trying to figure something out. It’s trying to figure out your opponent and what shots to throw. I am a person who has so many things going on at one time, and I just thrive off it. It’s just my personality.”

The goal for Stephanie Mavromatis is to go as far as she can in her chosen field in boxing. “It’s just to win as many fights as I can,” Mavromatis says. “I am climbing up the white-collar league; I am around number ten in the UK, which isn’t bad considering I haven’t been as active as some of the other fighters. I also currently hold two belts in two weight divisions. I just want to keep fighting, and climbing up those rankings, and to get my name out there.

“My family ask me this all the time,” she adds when I enquire when she will hang up the gloves. “I say I will box until I can’t box anymore.”

Stephanie Mavromatis will have fight number twelve next month.