She’s only 25, but she’s already lived more than one life. Davina Michel—France’s first female boxer to qualify for the Olympics in the 75kg category—personifies the resilience and fighting spirit of her sport. She owes her first encounter with the noble art to the weather. In 2007, Hurricane Dean struck her native Martinique and swept away the dojo where she’d learned karate. “I started when I was 7 and practiced with my dad, who was an elite karateka. After the dojo was destroyed, he pivoted to kickboxing, and I followed him,” she recalls.

To refine her technique, the 14-year-old began boxing at the Ring Stars club in Duclos. She quickly drew attention, and by 2012 was fighting her first matches on the French mainland. Over the next year, her raw talent flourished: “I became the French Cadet 66kg champion. The French national team selected me for the European Games, where I won the 70kg gold, and then the 70kg silver at the Junior World Championships,” she recalls.

After this string of successes, the French national team invited her to compete at the 2013 Youth Olympic Games. Meanwhile, Davina signed up at Tchok Matinik, the boxing club founded by her father. Soon, her meteoric rise raised a question: should she enter INSEP—the “champion factory” for French athletes—and go even further? In September 2014, she left Martinique, and moved into the INSEP campus in Paris.

But with her family over 6,500 km away, the 16-year-old was struggling. “It all happened so fast. Once I got to INSEP, I had to grapple with disorientation and the mainland culture—and I was on my own when the others went home to their families.... Things got very complicated. Mentally, I just wasn’t ready,” Davina admits, adding, “and INSEP probably wasn’t either. They’d never had such a young overseas boxer living on their campus before.” Two years and one bout of depression later, she made up her mind. Even though she was the France Elite 75kg silver medallist, she hung up her gloves and went home to Martinique.

She found comfort in her family. But in April 2018 she learned that her father was organizing a gala at Tchok Matinik with a special guest: Emmanuel Dos Santos. He coached at a boxing club in Garges-lès-Gonesse, north of Paris, and Davina had been close to some of its members during her stay at INSEP. Dos Santos encouraged Davina to do a little boxing, “just to see”—though he might have had more in mind. “He said, ‘You haven’t lost any of your talent. Come back and train with me in Garges. I’ll find you a job and a place to live, and you’ll go to the Olympics.’ It didn’t take long to get motivated,” she says.

Without waiting for her scores on the school-leaving exams she’d just taken, Davina flew back to mainland France in summer 2018, more mature, more accustomed to the demands of elite sport, and with more support and confidence in her own strength. She lost 30kg in 6 months, rejoined the French national team, became France Élites 75kg champion in early 2019, and won the title again in 2020 and 2021. “Getting back into the ring, that winning feeling, the hard work, the smell of the hall.... It was visceral for me,” she says. “Sometimes you just need someone who believes in you and says, ‘You can do it.’”

At the boxing club in Garges, Davina found a cocoon—a second family, a place where she could spend the holidays when she couldn’t go home to the West Indies. Now her routine was built around boxing and her day job as a dental assistant. “With all the training and matches, it had gotten very hard for me to do both,” she says. Even though the club made every effort, it wasn’t sustainable on the work side, and I wasn’t putting in enough days at the dental practice to earn a full salary.” But in summer 2022 she won a bronze at the World Championships in Istanbul, and everything changed.

The French Boxing Federation put Davina in touch with SNCF and our programme for elite athletes. “I’d had my eye on a job with Railway Security for a while,” she says, drawn by the prospect of “working with a team, keeping people safe and contributing the experience and self-control I’ve learned in practicing a combat sport.” After a series of interviews, aptitude tests and physicals, Davina joined SNCF on 19 January 2023. Since then, she’s been training to become a Railway Security officer in addition to her twice-daily boxing workouts.

“Everything about boxing is hard,” Davina admits. “If you make a mistake, you pay for it in cash, right there in the ring. You need discipline and rigour to give your all during those three 3-minute rounds in the ring.” From weightlifting, sparring and interval training to technique and tactics, Davina gives her sport everything she’s got. “Sometimes I think, ‘What the hell am I doing? ‘Why the f*** couldn’t I have just been a dancer?!’” she says with a laugh. But all the sacrifices have paid off. In June 2023 at the European Games in Krakow—despite having been under the weather the week before—she defeated German boxer Irina Schoenberger in the semi-finals and won her ticket to Paris 2024. 

Davina will be the first 75kg woman to box for France at the Olympic Games, and she’s setting her sights higher now. “When you’re in a sport this tough, you need to reach for the stars—you have to take first or win an Olympic medal. That would be a personal achievement, because boxing has made me not just the athlete but the woman I am today.”

2024

Quarter-final (-75kg) at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games

2023

Qualified for the Olympic Games Paris 2024 (75kg)

Silver medal 75kg, European Games, Krakow

2022

Bronze medal 75kg, World Championships, Istanbul 

2021

Gold medal, French Championships, 75kg

2020

Gold medal, French Championships, 75kg

2019

Gold medal, French Championships, 75kg

2016

Silver medal, French Championships, 75kg