Jodie Wilkinson: Meet the former rugby league player from Castleford selected to fight for Team England boxing at Commonwealth Games

Jodie Wilkinson played rugby from the age of six all the way up to 19, but by then had started to fall out of love with the game.

Granted, she turned up for matches on a Sunday, but during the week when she should have been training and looking after herself she was, by her own admission, “enjoying food and drink – I was 19, living the student life”.

So she decided to take part in a charity boxing event at Headingley, “just to lose a bit of weight and raise a bit of money for MacMillan Cancer”.

Seven years later, with boxing now her priority, Wilkinson has been selected to represent Team England’s boxing squad at the Commonwealth Games later this month. “It feels a massive achievement,” she tells The Yorkshire Post from her training base at the English Institute of Sport on Sheffield.

“From where I started in charity boxing to now going to the Commonwealth Games, I never imagined it.”

The journey from charity boxing to representing her country was not easy, and by no means the textbook way into the sport. Wilkinson fought in charity fights for a few months, training at Bethlehem Boxing Club in Leeds, before a friend suggested she tried her hand as an amateur. She joined Tigers Gym in Meanwood and ‘fell in love with it’.

The turning point came in 2019 when she won the national championships in the 75kg category, beating an experienced amateur in the final.

“I was the underdog, nobody expected me to win,” she says of an achievement that caught the attention of the GB Boxing coaches in Sheffield.

By January 2020 she was on the national programme part-time, four days a week in Sheffield on alternate weeks.

“We’d done about four camps when Covid hit,” she continues. “The coaches set us up with bag sessions on zoom, I’d go out running, and surprisingly my weight was okay when I came out of lockdown.”

Even now Wilkinson remains contracted only part-time with GB Boxing, meaning she should only train every other week in Sheffield. But she wants more.

“Even though I’m only part-time I ask if I can come here every week,” she says.

“I’m just trying to get better as a boxer, trying to get a full-time contract. I come down on my weeks off because I want to be the best version of myself, the best at my weight.”

Of the 14 boxers who will represent hosts England in Birmingham from July 28, Wilkinson is the only part-time boxer.

“I’d just finishined a training session when they told me I’d been picked,” continues Wilkinson, who is joined in Team England’s boxing squad by Bradford’s Harris Akbar, fresh from winning the European title last month.

“I certainly wasn’t expecting it, I didn’t think I was in the running for it.

“I had to ask them if they’d got the right person. And now I can’t stop smiling.

“It’s really overwhelming, but it’s been a lot of hard work, a lot of graft, missing social events – but it’s my life now and I love it.”

When she isn’t boxing, Wilkinson works as a 999 call handler for the Yorkshire Ambulance Service, a 10-hour shift, every Sunday.

“I like to help people, I enjoy working, have done since I was 14,” she says.

In Birmingham she will fight in the 70kg (light middleweight) division and wants to savour every moment of the Commonwealth Games experience.

“Boxing has changed my life; physically, mentally, everything. I live, eat, sleep, breathe it.”