‘I’m just one of a billion’: refugee Cindy Ngamba’s remarkable road to Olympics

It’s the stink of the gym Cindy Ngamba remembers best. Sweat, leather and bleach. It was like nothing she had ever smelled, and she loved it. She was 15, and had just finished football training when she saw these boys come into the changing rooms at her youth club. They were steaming in the heat and it looked, to her, like they were on fire. She was curious, walked past them through the door and saw more of them, some working heavy bags, some fighting shadows, some sparring in a ring. It was the first time she had ever seen anyone box. “And I said to myself, right then: ‘This, this is what I want to do.’”

She asked the old man running the place if she could join in with the next session. Ngamba, who was born in Cameroon, had been in England for only four years. She was still learning English. She was shy, she was overweight and she was being bullied at school because of her size, the way she spoke and because she didn’t know what deodorant was.

The man’s name was Dave Langhorn. “Come back tomorrow,” he said. When she did, he told her to do 10 press-ups, 10 sit-ups, 10 squats and three minutes of skipping. It was the same at the session after, and the one after that. “Every day I’d come thinking: ‘Today’s the day I’m going to get to put gloves on,’ but it never was.” Ngamba decided it was a test. “I remember thinking: ‘He’s trying to challenge me, trying to see if I’m going to quit.’” So she pushed herself harder. “I mean, that’s how I’ve always done life. OK. Let’s go again, and again, and again.”

Langhorn didn’t know it, but after every session Ngamba would go up to the gym upstairs and work on the treadmill. “He thought I used to go home, till he caught me at it one time.” She grew leaner and harder. After a year and a half, Langhorn finally let her start on learning footwork in the mirror, “forward, backward, sideways, left, right, move my hands, move my head, move my feet, step, slip, roll, step, slip, roll”. And after three more months, he finally asked her if she wanted to try sparring. “And without hesitating I said: ‘Yes.’”

He put her in with a boy. “He was tall, six-foot, 100kg or something like it.” They circled, and “he just didn’t want to hit me, he’s touching me, touching me, and I was thinking: ‘Why are you touching me like that?’ And I decided: ‘You know what, I’m going to hit this guy.’” So she did. Twice. “And I think I pissed him off.” He hit her back and she fell. There are two ways you can take that. “Some people, the first time they get hit, they get frightened. But what that boy did made me. Because I thought: ‘Oh, so that’s it, that’s what it is like to get punched, that’s all it is.’ So when that boy hit me, he made me fall in love with boxing.”

She bounced up and said ‘good shot’ and started in on him. She remembers the looks Langhorn gave her, “like: ‘She’s crazy, man, I have a crazy one here.’”

Six years later, Ngamba has won three national titles in three separate weight classes. Langhorn is still her coach, but these days she works out of the Team GB gym at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield. Three of the walls carry rows of photos of the men and women who have won medals at previous Olympics, and a clock on the fourth is counting down the hours until the next one. GB’s performance director, Rob McCracken, the man who trained many of those medallists, believes Ngamba has a real shot at becoming one herself in Paris this summer. But if she does, it won’t be for Great Britain.

Ngamba grew up in England, has family here, went to school and university here, has won national boxing titles here, and is, in effect, an honorary member of the country’s boxing team. “She’s part of the family,” says McCracken. But she is unable to represent Great Britain because she has repeatedly been denied citizenship, even after GB Boxing supported her application to the Home Office. She is officially a refugee, and will, instead, not only be representing the IOC’s refugee team but has also been given the honour of being their flagbearer at the opening ceremony.

Ngamba is a lesbian, and homosexuality is still a criminal offence in Cameroon. Human Rights Watch has reported that the country’s laws have created a climate “that allows both other Cameroonians and security forces to abuse and assault LGBTI people without consequence”.

“That’s why they couldn’t send me back,” says Ngamba. Not that it stopped them trying. In 2019 she was arrested when she was attending a routine appointment at the immigration office in Manchester. “One of the officers was standing there, he told me to go with him, so I went into this room, and when I opened the door I saw loads of officers, one with the handcuffs, and he’s telling me: ‘You’re under arrest.’ It was like one of those moments you see in movies.

“Don’t get it twisted, I was a migrant, and the Home Office kept rejecting me, so I knew it could happen. Even when I was walking the street they could have put me in a van, when I woke up they could have been waiting at my door. But …” They handcuffed her, put her in a van and drove her to a detention centre outside London. “That was the worst. Everything was numb, I couldn’t talk, only see and hear. I remember you had to sign in and register, and I couldn’t give my name because I was just so shocked, I didn’t have the words. They gave me a room, and a bed, but that night I could barely sleep because I was wondering what was going to happen.

“I didn’t even say bye to my family, my siblings. I’d already created a life for myself here in the UK, and I can barely remember things in Cameroon. I don’t have any family there. So I was asking myself: ‘How am I going to survive?’”

In the centre Ngamba met mother and daughters, “people that were going to be sent back to their country that day, and people that didn’t even know when they were going to be sent back, and people who had been there for years and were still fighting their case”. As she was talking to them, her head was spinning. “I’m thinking: ‘OK, so what’s going to happen to me?’” She called her brother Kennett that night, in tears. “He told me: ‘Stop crying, be strong, everything will be fine, just keep yourself busy.’”

Her brother contacted an uncle in France, and between them they managed to do whatever paperwork it was the authorities needed done. She still doesn’t really understand what happened, or why she was released. “I got let go, I think the van drove me to the train station, I met my brother there, and they gave us a ticket back home.” She was finally granted refugee status in 2019. But refugees can’t box for Great Britain. “I’ve always said I’d be honoured to represent Team GB, you know, I’ve always wanted it, it’s been my dream ever since I started.” Listening to her, learning about how she has been treated in this country, I wonder why.

But the boxing community was good to her. Team GB arranged the help she needed with the Home Office, they fixed employment for her as a sparring partner with the squad so that she could be included in all their training camps, and, when it turned out she wouldn’t be able to box for them, they helped with her application to join the IOC’s refugee team. “They opened their arms to me, they see my skills, and they believe in me, just like I believe in myself.” In March she became the first refugee to qualify for Olympic boxing. The International Olympic Committee’s president, Thomas Bach, said he was following her qualifying tournament on TV himself.

“I’m not going to lie to you, when I got my refugee status I was a bit embarrassed to tell people, you know?” she says. “Because people think I just came to the country just to take, take, take. But you get older, and you educate yourself a bit about what some people have gone through to become refugees, fleeing war and murder. There are so many of them out there, all around the world. I’m just one of a billion, you know? I’m just one of the few that got given the opportunity, some never are. There are refugees out there working their ass off, just hoping that one day someone will notice them, someone will pay attention to them. Well, I was one of those ones that was given the opportunity. And I want to make sure that I make the most of it.

“Boxing is not easy,” Ngamba says, “but it is compared to what these people have experienced in life.”