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Boxer Claressa Shields,17, Reaches Olympic Semifinal, Where A Medal Awaits

U.S. boxer Claressa Shields is declared the winner on points over Anna Laurell of Sweden in the women's middleweight boxing quarterfinals at the 2012 London Olympic Games.
Jack Guez
/
AFP/Getty Images
U.S. boxer Claressa Shields is declared the winner on points over Anna Laurell of Sweden in the women's middleweight boxing quarterfinals at the 2012 London Olympic Games.

U.S. Olympic boxer Claressa Shields, the teenager whose dream of being in the first crop of Olympic women boxers led her to tell her story on All Things Considered back in February, will fight for a medal in London.

A native of Flint, Mich., Shields, 17, won her first middleweight bout in an 18-14 decision, reaching the semifinal round and guaranteeing her at least a bronze medal. In boxing, the two losers of the semifinal fights both win bronze. But she has a shot at gold or silver, if Shields can get past Kazakhstan's Marina Volnova. Their boxing match is scheduled for Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. ET.

As she told NPR and Radio Diaries, Shields would live at the gym if she could. Here's more of her story, from February:

"Claressa attributes her start in boxing to her father, Clarence Shields, an amateur underground boxer who was nicknamed "Cannonball" because of his fast, hard punches. Clarence went to prison when Claressa was 2 and didn't come out until she was 9, but Claressa clearly remembers the stories her father shared from his fighting days."

"When Claressa first asked Clarence if she could box, he told her that boxing was a man's sport. 'That made me so mad,' Claressa recalls. But she wouldn't give up on the idea, and when she was 11 years old, her father finally brought her to the gym."

"'I'm going to be honest, my first thought was you would get beat up and quit," her father tells her. But Claressa proved him wrong."

"'I'm still proving people wrong,' she says."

This is the first Olympics to have women's boxing as an official medal sport.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Bill Chappell is a writer and editor on the News Desk in the heart of NPR's newsroom in Washington, D.C.