Sport

Former taekwondo star Jade Jones eyeing professional boxing career

10 Sep 2026 3 minute read

Jade Jones (right) and North Macedonia’s Miljana Reljikj during the Women’s Taekwondo -57kg Round of 16 contest last summer. Photo Mike Egerton/PA Wire.

Phil Blanche, Press Association

Double Olympic taekwondo champion Jade Jones has a professional boxing career in her sights after starting out with two wins in the Misfits ring.

Jones quit taekwondo for boxing 18 months ago and says the buzz of the fight game has left her feeling “like a kid again”.

The 33-year-old from Flint in North Wales meets Hungarian MMA fighter Sheena Bathory for the Misfits super-middleweight title in Newcastle on Saturday.

Misfits was set up by influencer and businessman KSI in 2022 to stage celebrity boxing matches between internet personalities, social media influencers, content creators and professional athletes.

“It (professional boxing) is definitely on my horizon,” said Jones, who trains under former British champion Stephen Smith in Liverpool and spars with top professionals Rhiannon Dixon and Olivia Holmes.

“I’m trying to take it step by step, because with taekwondo I put so much pressure on myself and it almost didn’t become fun in the end.

“I just had nothing left to give to taekwondo, but I wasn’t quite ready to retire. My body felt in really good shape and I still had that hunger and fire.

“It’s so exciting how good I feel like I’m getting already. I just want to keep testing myself and get better. See how high we can get.”

Jones breezed through her first two bouts, against US reality TV star Egypt Criss and Argentine combat sports influencer Federikita.

Both were delivered with brutal knockouts as Jones lived up to her taekwondo nickname ‘Headhunter’.

“I do still love the head, but I haven’t got a name yet,” said Jones. “I was just waiting to see if anything stuck. Probably ‘Knockout Queen’ at the moment.

“‘Headhunter’ does work well because I don’t go to the body much.”

Jones won Great Britain’s first-ever Olympic taekwondo gold medal at London 2012 and successfully defended her title at Rio de Janeiro four years later.

But further Olympic success at Tokyo in 2021 and Paris 2024 proved elusive, with Jones eventually realising she had gone stale.

She said: “Paris was kind of the last one in my head anyway. But if I’d won, I probably would have stuck there trying to do another one.

“In taekwondo, weirdly, 31 (when she retired) is quite old, but in boxing, it’s young. It’s a totally different mentality and, with anything, you don’t really know you’re stale until you do something else.

“It’ll obviously be hard (watching) when the Olympics is on. That will be the first one I’ve missed and I’ll definitely have itchy feet.

“In a way it’s quite sad for taekwondo that we fought all the time but it was never really shown, apart from the Olympics every four years when we were made a fuss of.

“I’m sure there was 8,000 watching me at the London Olympics, whereas my last fight there was 21,000.

“It shows how crazy boxing is. The whole fight week is carnage and like a circus, but I absolutely just love it and the journey I’m on.”

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