Who is Team GB boxer Karriss Artingstall and what rank is she in the military?
TEAM GB have racked up 24 medals so far at the Tokyo Olympics and boxer Karriss Artingstall is set to add another.
Artingstall has made it to the semi-finals of the 57kg weight division and is guaranteed to leave Japan with a bronze medal in tow.
READ JOSHUA BUATSI’S THOUGHTS ON TEAM GB BOXING
Team GB also have boxers Pat McCormack and Ben Whittaker set to leave the Games with medals, following on from the team’s success in 2012 and 2016.
Who is Karriss Artingstall and what rank is she in the military?
Artingstall is the first ever British female soldier to box at the Olympics and came into the games having medalled internationally before.
She won bronze at the Worlds in 2019 before taking home the silver in the Europeans the same year.
Artingstall, 26, a Gunner in the British Army, joined the GB Boxing’s Podium Potential squad in 2018.
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She’s known as the ‘Bomber’ because of her impressively powerful punch, and was excluded from three schools as a youngster.
Artingstall ended up at college where she took PE, before getting into boxing.
Every Friday she would hone her craft in the gym, before the Macclesfield-born fighter joined the Army.
There, Artingstall hold’s the rank of gunner in the 1 Regiment Royal Horse Artillery.
Her former boxing coach, Sergeant Jay Allen, who worked out of the Army Boxing Centre, has said that Artingstall is like ‘action woman’.
“If you made an Action Woman figure it would be Karriss,” Allen said before the Games.
She’s just an athlete and boxing is something she has a passion for but I think you could put her in any sport and she’d go far.”
Artingstall now stands just two wins away from Olympic gold, which Allen is convinced the can achieve.
“She can do the job. You just hope and pray.”