(AUG 21) Magdalena Dalecki got her professional career off to a blistering start on the SES bill in Halle on Saturday evening when she kayoed Slavka Scepkova of Slovakia in the first round. Having gone the distance with Maria Rosa Tabbuso in April, the Slovakian had been expected to provide worthy opposition, but not so: for the twenty-one-year-old economics student from Solingen, it was a two-minute workout on the heavy bag.

 

Not even two minutes, in fact. Trapped repeatedly against the ropes and trounced in the infighting, the Slovakian was caught by a ‘short, clean hook to the liver’ fifteen seconds from the end of the first round, and that was her (as the English would say) ‘sorted’. Dalecki’s trainer, Manfred Faber, was cock-a-hoop. “For a first fight, it couldn’t have gone better.”

 

They won’t have to wait long for the second. Dalecki is booked already to fight (again at super flyweight) in Karlsruhe on the 2nd September.

 

Born in Danzig in 1985, Magdalena took up wrestling at the age of seven and stuck with it for five years before moving on to tennis and (in 1999) amateur boxing, initially as a means of keeping fit. Her brother Michael, who began boxing at the same time, soon gave up, but Magdalena was bitten. “Many people seem to think it’s asocial. For me, it’s a combat sport like any other.” Faber, whose pupils have racked up some 55 championships of one kind or another and has been active in support of women’s boxing since the late Eighties, spotted her last Autumn in Duisberg and took her under his wing. After commuting for a while between Solingen, where she grew up (she studies in Wuppertal), and Faber’s base at the South Side Boxing Gym in Krefeld,  she now has a residence in both towns to reduce the time wasted in transit.

 

She trains up to three times a day: technique and tactics in the morning, sparring in the evenings, with the remaining session — shared often with the Düsseldorf Magics (a basketball team in Germany’s second division) whose fitness is also Faber’s responsibility — devoted to physical conditioning; “When the boys stop for breath,” notes Faber, “Magdalena carries on training”

 

Perhaps because in boxing the stakes are much higher.

 

They’re higher, too, in professional boxing than amateur — a point made by Dalecki herself last week.“Professional boxing is oriented towards the KO, which is seldom the case among the amateurs, so the training is necessarily different: above all, more intense.”

 

She spars mainly with boys (“they’re harder, so I get more out of it”) though with women it’s more competitive; a few weeks ago, she even sparred with WIBF featherweight champion Ina Menzer and is said to have given an excellent account of herself. With SES reportedly interested in offering her a contract, her breezy demolition of Scepkova can’t have hurt her chances of being able to turn what is still basically a hobby into a career — particularly since on the same bill at flyweight, Stephanie Penkwitt could manage nothing more than a points win over Simona Pencakova of Slovakia.

 

(Sources: Westdeutsche Zeitung, Mein Geld, Seconds Out, HK12)