Former UEL sports scholar and current British and Commonwealth Cruiserweight Boxing champion, Lawrence Okolie is one of the sports biggest prospects, he recently spoke to Rising East to discuss all matters, from his time at UEL to his transition to professional boxing. Here is everything you need to know about the undefeated East London knockout artist.
Quick Stats
Name: Lawrence Okolie
Nickname: “SAUCE”
Date Of Birth: 16/12/1992 (26)
Height: 6”5
Reach: 83 inch
Division: Cruiserweight
Stance: Orthodox
Pro Record: 12 Wins (9 KO) 0 Losses 0 Draws
Okolie grew up in Hackney, where he still lives today. He is the oldest of four children, with two brothers and a sister. Okolie’s parents are Nigerian but moved to England before he was born. He attended Stoke Newington School in Hackney, where he spoke openly about his struggles with bullying telling BBC News “Some of the stuff that was said and done by the bullies, it did affect you when you went home.” A lot of the bullying in high school centered around Okolie’s weight, who at one staged weighed 19 stone and was declared clinically obese by his doctors. Weight loss was the main reason behind Okolie starting boxing back in 2010, at the age of 17 and it was’t long after that when people started to recognised just how big of a talent Okolie was. The hackney native took great inspiration from watching boxing superstar and current unified heavyweight world champion Anthony Joshua win Olympic gold at London 2012, famously telling Sky Sports “ “I didn’t manage to watch any of the London 2012 Olympics live, but I did manage to watch it on TV while I was working at McDonalds, during my break.”
Time at UEL
The London Olympics may have been the moment that inspired Okolie to take boxing more seriously, but it wasn’t till he joined the acclaimed sports scholar programme at UEL in 2014, that these plans really started to take shape. “I was given a sports scholarship which meant that I was given financial help to allow me to train.” Okolie spoke glowingly about how UEL helped balance his academic work with his training telling Rising East “I studied Psychosocial Studies; it was good, the university worked with my lecturers and my boxing club to make sure I was able to train as much as I could and still do well in lessons. The biggest sporting highlight of Okolie time at UEL was winning the 2014 BUCS Championships, this was despite barley fighting that year as boxing clubs around London struggled to find opposition fighters on his level. Despite his great fondness about talking about this memory Okolie declared he dose’t have the medal telling Rising East “I did win a BUCS gold medal; it was nice because it was a fantastic KO in the final to win it. I don’t have any of my medals because I don’t like to hold onto tokens of achievement. I like to just create the memories and move on with the rest of my life.”
Rio Olympics
After two years of his degree Okolie decided to defer his third year to concentrate on his Olympic campaign. “I was fortunate enough to be picked to represent Great Britain as a full-time athlete, so the university was very accommodating towards that.” The Hackney native made the GB Olympic team after just 23 amateur fights, by winning the European Olympic Qualifying event in Samsun, Turkey. An incredible feat for someone with such little experience. At the 2016 Rio games, Okolie, fighting as a heavyweight, beat Igor Pawel Jakubowski from Poland on points in the Preliminary Round, then eventually lost to Erislandy Savon of Cuba, who would go on to win the bronze medal. Okolie cites the help of UEL as one of the key reasons he was able to be successful so fast in the amateur ranks telling Rising East “It got me used to training three times a day. I’ll do my own run, then there is strength and conditioning with people like Duncan, who still works at UEL and who I still work with now. That allowed me to get conditioned to be able to take the next step to get to the GB team, which was also three times a day. That transition was quite seamless because they prepped me for it.”
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Pro Career
On 18 January 2017, just a mere six months after the Olympics Okolie announced he was becoming a professional boxer, signing with Eddie Hearn and Matchroom Sport, the same stable that has guide Anthony Joshua’s career. Okolie first professional fight took place at the Manchester Arena in Manchester on 25 March 2017, where he stopped his opponent in twenty seconds. Okolie continued his meteoric rise through the professional ranks stopping six of his first seven fights inside the distance. It was then announced that on the 3rd of February 2018, Okolie would fight bitter London rival Isaac Chamberlain at the O2, both fighters had been regularly calling each other out on social media in the months before the fight was finally signed. Okolie would win the intense grudge match via a wide points decision and in the process win the vacant WBA Continental cruiserweight title, his first major professional title, Okolie would later add the British and Commonwealth titles to his ever-growing collection of belts. The latter being won back after previously vacating just last weekend at the CopperBox arena, with a stunning fourth-round knockout of East London veteran Wadi Camacho. Despite all this incredible success and the abundance of options available to one of boxing’s brightest young talents, Okolie still uses UEL facilities for his strength and conditioning work telling Rising East “It’s just a world-class facility, everything about it is just A1 and it’s just what I need. My passport is stamped, I’ve been around the world so when I say world class, I mean world class.
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Despite only having 12 professional fights under his belt, there are rumours that Okolie’s next fight could be for the WBA World Cruiserweight Championship against Denis Lebedev, in July. If you weren’t already excited about the remarkable potential of the former UEL man, you better be now, because you never know he could become a boxing world champion by the summer which would cap a meteoric rise for a very down to earth young man.