Quebec boxer Tammara Thibeault is fighting for world title, but has an eye toward elusive gold medal in LA28
To prepare for the toughest boxing match of her professional career, Tammara Thibeault went back to the amateurs.
Next week Thibeault, a 29-year-old from Shawinigan, Que., travels from her training base in Sheffield, England to Orlando, Fla., where she’ll challenge Desley Robinson for the Australian’s two middleweight titles, in a bout slated for Aug. 8 and scheduled to air on ESPN in the U.S.
The bulk of Thibeault’s training took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland where she shared high-level sparring with national team boxers from India and New Zealand, in town fine-tuning ahead of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland.
Short-term, the camp helped iron sharpen iron. Thibeault, the 2022 Commonwealth Games champ, and a cohort of 2026 hopefuls helping each other peak for big competitions occurring two weeks apart. A win next week would make Thibeault a world champion after just five pro fights, a feat only a handful of boxers have achieved.
But her long-range goals are even more audacious.
In late 2025 Thibeault resumed her career as an Olympic-style boxer, eyeing the podium in Los Angeles two years from now. If she keeps winning on both fronts, she could become the first reigning pro champion to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing. As an ambition, it’s far-fetched, but big plans are par for Tammara Thibeault’s course.
“I’m not afraid to take risks. It’s part of who I am,” said Thibeault in a Zoom interview from her apartment in Sheffield. “I love challenging myself. I love stepping up to the plate. I love making history. It’s cool. It’s satisfying.”
If we’re taking Thibeault’s goals in order, then we can’t take Aug. 8 – when she’ll challenge for Robinson’s IBF and WBO world titles – for granted. Robinson is a power punching veteran with a past win over Kaye Scott, who currently holds the other world title at middleweight. She qualified for next Saturday’s bout by shutting out Mary Spencer, the Canadian middleweight and women’s amateur boxing pioneer, in a title fight this past May. In recent weeks she’s been peppering her Instagram feed with shots of her rock-hard abs and bulbous biceps, signs that she intends to deliver a similar beatdown to Thibeault.
2-time Olympian Tammara Thibeault has made the decision to become a professional boxer, and is preparing for her first pro bout on December 13th. We speak to her about the decision, what it means for her future and how her Olympic experience from Tokyo and Paris led to the decision.
“I’ll be defending my belts again, and ensuring they come home where they belong,” Robinson wrote in a recent Instagram caption. “Nothing will stop me Aug. 8.”
If Robinson’s vision is target-locked on Thibeault, the Canadian challenger is still finding new ways to multitask.
Earlier in her pro career Thibeault balanced boxing with graduate school at the University of Sheffield. After finishing her masters in January she picked up a part-time job with I Trust Sport, a sport governance consultancy. And while working a day job and training as a pro pugilist, she also transitioned back into amateur boxing. Last November she won a Canadian amateur title, and in June she earned a silver medal at the Boxing World Cup in Guiyang, China.
Two summers from now, she’s hoping to top the podium in Los Angeles, and follow through on the unfulfilled promise of Paris 2024.
Thibeault entered those games as a favourite to reach the podium. The previous summer she claimed gold at the Pan Am Games, winning the final over Atheyna Bylon, the Panamanian standout and future Olympic silver medalist. And in April 2024 she reeled off a string of impressive wins at a pre-Olympic event in Colorado Springs.
I’ve got a bone to pick with the Olympics, and I say this out of love. It didn’t finish the way I wanted it to, and I want my Olympic journey to finish on my terms.– Tammara Thibeault
But she faltered in Paris, dropping a split decision to Cindy Ngamba of Great Britain in her opening-round match, and leaving the tournament empty-handed. Afterward she made a tearful promise to her coaches to return in four years. They told her to sleep on it, convinced she was just disappointed and venting, and would accept the defeat and move on.
Thibeault did eventually swallow that loss, but she still can’t stomach it. It still sits in her gut, uneasily. She’ll feel better, she says, after winning a medal at LA28.
“I’ve got a bone to pick with the Olympics, and I say this out of love,” says Thibeault, who won bronze at the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Australia. “It didn’t finish the way I wanted it to, and I want my Olympic journey to finish on my terms.”
Watch Canada’s Tammara Thibeault take on China’s Ziyi Bao in the finals at the World Boxing Cup second stage action from Guiyang City, CHN.
The traditional path to mainstream stardom for North American pro boxers is easy to plot but almost impossible to follow. First, win Olympic gold. Then parlay that medal, and the fan base you built on the journey to the podium, into accolades that pay: sponsorships, big money promotional deals, television ratings, tickets sold. That formula worked as well for Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman in the 1960s as it did for Ray Leonard, who won gold in Montreal 50 years ago.
In the 1980s, Evander Holyfield and Roy Jones Jr. became the exceptions that proved the rule. Each man the best fighter in his weight class, and each settling for bronze because of poor officiating. Holyfield was DQ’d in 1984 for punching when on the break, and in 1988 Jones was the victim of the worst judges’s decision in Olympic boxing history. Both went on to cross over from “Boxing Famous” to just plain famous.
By 1992, an Olympic title had become such a crucial element of boxing marketing that Oscar De La Hoya, who won the 132-pound division in Barcelona, made it part of his nickname: The Golden Boy.
A generation later, Thibeault isn’t ripping up that playbook as much as she’s adapting it to the current sports business environment. One key difference between now and the Sugar Ray Leonard Days: pro boxers are now Olympic eligible.
High-profile examples of amateur/pro hybrids include Keyshawn Davis of the U.S., who was 3-0 as a pro before he won silver at 132 pounds at Tokyo 2020. The winner of the super-heavyweight division that year was Bakhodir Jalolov, who was 7-0 professionally when he won the Tokyo tournament. After that gold medal, he won seven more pro fights before returning for Paris 2024 and winning again.
In that sense, boxing is still miles behind sports like basketball and tennis where Olympic tournaments include top professionals. LeBron James and Serena Williams each have Olympic titles, but the current biggest names in pro boxing aren’t reviving their amateur careers for the chance to win medals. Instead, pro fighters who moonlight as Olympians tend to be early career prospects seeking to juice their visibility.
That effect is even more pronounced in women’s boxing, which entered the Olympics in 2012, and where the pro game is still developing, and where even elite pros like Thibeault can capitalize on the exposure that comes with an Olympic podium finish.
“If she becomes a gold medallist at the Olympics, that will only inure more benefit to her pro career, which will inure more benefit to MVP, which will inure more benefit to woman’s boxing,” says Nakisa Bidarian, CEO of Most Valuable Promotions, the company backing Thibeault’s pro career. “I hope we can have a gold medallist on our roster from Canada. That would be amazing.”
MVP, the outfit Bidarian runs alongside Jake Paul, is heavily invested in women’s pro boxing. Five of the top 10 women on the pound-for-pound rankings at Boxrec, the online boxing stats database, are under contract to MVP. In March MVP signed a deal to become ESPN’s main boxing provider, with women’s bouts headlining cards on the sports broadcast titan. The Robinson-Thibeault title fight headlines the fifth card under that agreement. And in July MVP entered a partnership with the U.K.-based promoter Matchroom Boxing to promote women’s fights.
Despite those developments, statistics hint at how much room women’s pro boxing still has to grow.
According to Boxrec, the sport’s official record keeper, Thibeault is already the world’s second-ranked middleweight, even as she enters just her fifth pro bout. Compare that setup to the men’s side, where Carlos Adames has a 25-1-1 record and the World Boxing Council title on his resume, and ranks second among nearly 2,100 registered professional middleweights. The women’s middleweight division features just 53 pros worldwide, with elite performers like Thibeault clustered at the top, and fighters with underwater records dotting the bottom half of the top 30.
That high-level pressure I’ve been exposed to in the amateurs, I can use it in the professional ranks.– Thibeault
For high-level women’s fighters, the search for top-flight competition often leads to rematches – legendary women’s boxers Amanda Serrano and Katie Taylor have squared off three times. And it sometimes results in weight-class hopping. Two-time Olympic gold medalist Claressa Shields has won pro titles in four different divisions, and is embarking on her second campaign as a middleweight.
Or the quest for a challenge can bring top pros back to the amateurs, where talent pools are deeper, and international tournaments guarantee stiff competition.
“That high-level pressure I’ve been exposed to in the amateurs, I can use it in the professional ranks,” Thibeault says.
Thibeault is ranked second among 53 pro middleweights, but among amateurs she’s third among 352. Given those numbers, it’s not surprising that Shields, who faces Kaye Scott on Aug. 15 for the World Boxing Council middleweight crown, still sees the Olympics as the pinnacle of women’s boxing competitions.
“It’s my Olympic gold medals,” Shields told the Inside Ring podcast, when asked to name her greatest achievement. “You really have to earn it. It’s not just the Olympics. You have to go through nationals, then the world championships… then the Olympics, where it’s only the best.”
Shields also the top seed in a de facto women’s middleweight tournament unfolding in August. If she defeats Scott — as of Friday, FanDuel listed Shields as a -3000 favourite — she becomes a logical future opponent for the winner between Thibeault and Robinson.
But if Thibeault is plotting a path to LA28 as a reigning pro world champ, Shields is more than a roadblock. She’s a women’s boxing trailblazer, an undefeated champion who rarely loses rounds, and one of a handful of women’s boxers to gross seven figures for a single fight. Her matchups are appointment viewing for fans of women’s boxing, but Team Thibeault insists they’re open to facing her provided they both win their scheduled bouts.
“If Tamm is in a position to fight Claressa Shields, we’d love to do that,” Bidarian says. “Of course.”
But a Shields showdown is a hypothetical. The 2028 Olympics are already on the calendar, and the qualification process for Thibeault is clear. If she earns a national team spot, for 2027, then makes the final at the Pan Am Games or world championships, she’ll have a ticket to LA28.
Whether she arrives as a reigning pro champ, and makes history in the process, depends first on handling Robinson first.
“I want to do something great on Saturday, Aug. 8,” she says. “For me to do that, I need to be right there and then. I don’t need to be thinking about the next thing.”
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