Cindy Ngamba trains with GB Boxing but isn’t allowed to represent Great Britain (Photo: Getty)
Boxer Cindy Ngamba is hopeful of winning a medal at the Paris 2024 Olympics – but has vowed never to go back to her home country of Cameroon.
Ngamba left the African nation aged just 11 with her family to head to the UK, where they settled in Bolton, eventually being granted asylum status years later.
She picked up boxing a decade ago, but while she trains with GB Boxing and had hoped to represent Great Britain at the games, she has been prevented from doing so after failing to attain a British passport in time.
As such, in Paris she is representing the 37-athlete strong Refugee Olympic Team and was one of their flagbearers in the opening ceremony.
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But Ngamba has no intention of ever stepping foot in the country of her birth again, having come out as gay aged 18.
‘In Cameroon, it’s illegal to have any kind of sexuality instead of straight,’ the now 25-year-old said of this summer’s games.
Ngamba is through to the quarter-finals of the boxing (Photo: Getty)
‘Because you get killed and you get put into prison and you get tortured.
‘That was one of the reasons why I was given refugee status. I can’t go back.’
Ngamba’s worst fears were nearly realised shortly after she came out, when she and her brother were arrested during a routine visit to an immigration centre in Bolton and subsequently sent to a detention camp in London.
‘It was like a prison in there, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,’ she recalled.
Ngamba was a flagbearer for the Refugee Olympic Team (Photo: Getty)
‘I spoke to some of the women, some had children with them, some didn’t know if they were going back that evening. I was left with so many thoughts, not knowing what was going to happen to me.
‘I had created something here and I would be sent back to a country I hadn’t been to since I was a child.’
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Everything has been going to plan so far in Paris however, winning her opening bout in the women’s 75kg event against the third seed Tammara Thibeault from Canada.
Ngamba, who previously won British National Amateur Championships in three different weight categories, will now take on France’s Davina Michel in the quarter-finals on Sunday.
‘If it wasn’t for the support I got from the people who saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself…no matter how hard you try, it’s those people who started this for me.
‘Having to adapt to a lifestyle here was difficult. Then becoming an adult and needing papers to take the next step, making my case to the Home Office and failing so many times, it’s been very, very hard.’
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