The Thai Women Punching Their Way Out of Poverty

She was boxing for money. Even at 13 years old, she knew that.

Why else, said Janjaem Suwannapheng, would she commit to a sport in which a boy smashed her nose in, back when she was shorter than the stalks of rice in the fields near home?

“Anyone who becomes a boxer does it because they come from a poor background,” she said. “It hurts, it’s tiring, it’s exhausting.”

Of course, Janjaem is really good at boxing. She was the first girl to train at her local gym in Thailand’s rural northeast. She loves the sport now, she said. At last year’s world championships, she won a silver medal in her welterweight division (66 kg, about 145 pounds). At the Paris Olympics, she is into the round of 16 with a bye.

Even if she goes no further, Janjaem said, boxing has already saved her. Now 24, she has bought land and gold for her parents and a pickup truck for herself. She scored an athletic scholarship to a university. Her older brother, by contrast, left school at 15 to work with their father, a truck driver.

Boxing is a national passion in Thailand, where the confluence of hardscrabble living and a fondness for illegal gambling — on anything from cockfighting and buffalo racing to a fin-snapping standoff between Siamese fighting fish — has made the sport tremendously lucrative. The local variety, muay Thai, or Thai boxing, relies on lightning strikes with legs, knees, elbows and fists first honed by ancient warriors dedicated to the “way of the eight limbs.”