The British flyweight, the third champion boxer in his family, on bouncing back from defeat in Rio to a gold medal in Tokyo
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The seed for Galal Yafai’s gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics was planted five years earlier. At the Rio Games in 2016, the British flyweight boxer lost in the second round. The defeat really hit him on the flight home: while Team GB’s medal winners, the likes of Nicola Adams and Mo Farah, were treated to first-class and business seats, the other athletes were “brushed to the back of the plane”. It was a feeling that Yafai did not want to relive.
“I was devastated,” he recalls. “I was devastated losing and then when I got on the plane, no one wants to take photos of you, no one wants to speak to you. And I remember thinking: ‘This is absolutely horrible. If I go to another Olympics, I need to be sitting at the front.’”