Mary Kom
A farmer's daughter from Manipur who won six world boxing titles, one of them as a mother of twins
Mangte Chungneijang Mary Kom grew up in a village in Manipur, in India's remote north-east, the eldest child of a landless farm worker. She helped in the fields and with her younger siblings, and did athletics at school. It was seeing a local man, Dingko Singh, come home from the 1998 Asian Games with a boxing gold that made her want to fight.
She trained in secret because she knew her father would refuse. He found out when her photograph appeared in a newspaper after she won a state title in 2000. He was worried about her face, her marriage prospects and the cost, and it took time before he accepted it. Money was a constant problem; her early kit was borrowed and she travelled to competitions with barely enough for food.
She won her first world championship in 2002, and by 2006 had three. In 2007 she gave birth to twin boys and many assumed she was finished. She returned in 2008 and won the world title again, and a fifth in 2010. At the 2012 Olympics, the first to include women's boxing, she fought two weight classes above her usual one because her division was not on the programme, and still won a bronze.
In 2018, at 35, she won a sixth world title, a record for any woman. She has since served in the upper house of the Indian parliament and runs a boxing academy in Manipur.