Ramla Ali's athletic talent, charisma, and compelling personal journey have attracted the attention of both the boxing and modeling worlds 📝 seanmgregory
“My next aim is to become a world champion,” says Ali. “And I’ll stop at nothing to achieve it.”know the details of her own family history until her husband, Richard Moore, began asking her parents questions after they began dating in 2016. She was aware, for example, that she had an older brother who died Somalia’s civil war when she was a toddler. She did not know that a grenade exploded near him while he was playing outside in Mogadishu.
Looking back, Ali wishes she knew these stories earlier in her life. “So I could comfort my mom,” she says. “She went through so much trauma as a mother. A mother is always trying to be brave and show strength to their kids. But we could have been in a position that would have allowed her to be vulnerable and have no judgment from us. And we just didn’t know.”
The family settled in London, where Ali’s father worked in construction. When she was around 12, she stared taking boxing classes at a local gym, mostly to improve her fitness after she was bulled for being overweight. She didn’t spar until she was 17. “I got beat up,” says Ali. “It’s in that moment that you know if boxing is for you. I actually really liked it, as sadistic as that sounds. Because I wanted to come back and keep improving.
Knowing her parents didn’t want her boxing, Ali tried to hide her burgeoning amateur career. But at times she’d come home with bruises, giving her whereabouts away. For years, she believed her religion drove family opposition: that her strict parents did not want a Muslim girl competing in sports. But more recently, Ali’s mother explained that her disapproval had more to do with the violent nature of the sport, combined with family’s painful past in Somalia.
At first, Ali admits, her plan to represent Somalia was selfish. Qualifying as the lone boxer from the country would be easier than winning a spot in a more crowded Great Britain field. But then she started receiving messages from Somalia’s global diaspora. Because of you, people told her, my daughter took up karate, or tae kwon do. She remembers fighting in New Delhi at the 2018 World Boxing Championships, and seeing Somali immigrants in India waving the Somali flag at her match.
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