Cecilia Braekhus finds that when she is back in Norway there is nowhere to hide. There is no escape from the past and no escape from what waits for her in the future. There is no escape from being reminded of what she is and has been for most of her life, nor any escape from the reality that she will no longer be that – a professional fighter – after Saturday night.
On Saturday night, in Lillestrom, Braekhus fights Ema Kozin for Kozin’s WBC and WBO super-welterweight titles. The fight offers Braekhus the chance to become a world champion in a second weight class, having previously dominated welterweight for 11 years. It also marks the first time Braekhus will have boxed in Norway since 2017, as well as the last time we will ever see her in a ring.
“To be honest, right now there is so much training I’m too tired to even think about it [this being the last fight],” Braekhus told Boxing Scene. “Right now, it’s just day by day. I’m just setting goals for the next training session and focusing on my task. Today I had four brilliant sparring partners coming at me in the gym.
“I’m also in Norway now, so I’m doing a lot of media in between [training sessions]. This morning, I did the Norwegian morning show and then I had a newspaper follow me at the sparring. It’s very good to be home, but being in Norway, there is of course a lot more media attention than when I have camp outside of Norway. It’s a very small country.”
Before returning to Norway to finish her camp, Braekhus had spent four weeks in London, England preparing for the Kozin fight alongside her trainer, Johnathon Banks. It was there, in England, she could hide and focus only on what was important – the present, the immediate, the fight. There, in England, she was seldom reminded that this fight, her next one, would be her last and that, come October 5, she would be known as a former boxer, not an active one.
“London has kind of been like my second home when I’m fighting in Europe,” Braekhus said. “It has often been my base. I have some incredible friends there in the boxing community and we get everything we could ask for to have a great camp. I love being in London. We’re like five minutes away from Big Ben, so I run around that part of the city and experience the city from that point of view. Training camp there was just amazing. We did lots of hard work and had some great sparring.”
Be that as it may, there was only ever going to be one place Braekhus would finish her camp and indeed her career. That place, for Braekhus, was always going to be Norway – her homeland, the country in which she was raised and where she first learned how to box. More than just her home, Braekhus feels she owes Norway her final fight. After all, as hard as it is to believe now, professional boxing was banned in Norway for 33 years until Braekhus fought to have the ban lifted in 2014.
“That was funny,” she recalled. “Professional boxing had been illegal in Norway since 1981 and, yeah, a girl had to come and take down that ban. I fought in Norway for the first time before a sold-out crowd in Oslo [against Anne Sophie Mathis in 2016]. That was definitely one of the highlights in my career, so I kind of had to have the last fight in Norway just because Norway took down that ban for me.”
Back when Braekhus started boxing in Norway, the sport, especially the women’s game, looked much different than it does today. Even when she turned professional, in 2007, there was nothing like the attention given to female fighters in 2025, nor the same purses or opportunities. In fact, Braekhus, like so many of her era, was back then fighting not only for her own future but the future of women with whom she had yet to cross paths or share a ring.
“Everybody was telling me at that point that I would never be a champion because girls can’t be champions,” she said. “Remember, this is a while ago. It was a very harsh critique, but this was before women could go to the Olympics, it was before the Me-Too movement, it was before women were allowed in boxing gyms to train alongside men. Some male trainers would refuse to train women. I had one trainer who didn’t want to train a woman. It was a very different time and atmosphere, but even then, I still knew I would be a champion one day.
“It just made me more determined. When people said that women shouldn’t box, it was so weird to me. Of course women can box. I had so many incredible women around me who went to the European championships, the World championships, and delivered fights at the highest level. All these women kind of paved the way for this current generation, who are all able to go to the Olympics and don’t have to deal with all the stupidity we had to deal with. I’m very proud of that.”
Braekhus, 38-2-1 (9 KOs), added: “I was right where I needed to be. I was part of a movement and I became a ‘first’ in so many things. I was the first undisputed female world champion and the first woman to fight on HBO [Home Box Office]. So I’m extremely proud of everything I have achieved. I have never wished I had come along a little bit later. Of course, it would be great to be part of the Olympics, but I just got to be part of something else. I got to be part of the generation that paved the way for these young fighters today.”
One of those young fighters is Ema Kozin, a 26-year-old from Slovenia who, in 2023, defeated England’s Hannah Rankin to become the WBC and WBO super-welterweight champion. As the owner of those two belts, Kozin, 24-1-1 (12), now has the rather unenviable task of making her first defence against Braekhus in a fight promoted as “The Final Bell”. In other words, Kozin knows the story and her role in it and knows exactly how the people inside the Nova Spektrum will expect and want this story to end on Saturday night.
“I saw her fight against Hannah Rankin,” said Braekhus. “I actually thought Hannah could have won that fight. It could go both ways, it was a very close fight, but it was a little surprising that she won the decision in England.
“With that being said, she is a very good fighter. She is a southpaw, which is always challenging, and so it’s not going to be an easy fight at all. She has the belt for a reason. She beat Hannah in England. I’m sure she’s now intending to do the same in Norway against me.
“But she’s not going to come to Norway and do the same thing she did in England because I feel like, boxing-wise, I’m superior to her. I think she’s going to be very aggressive and physical and I’m going to box her. That’s the way I’m going to win. She’s very strong, and she’s very tough, but, boxing-wise, I’m better.”
For the most part that has been true in each of Braekhus’ 41 professional fights to date. Measured, composed and technically excellent, Braekhus has long been considered one of the finest pure boxers in the women’s game and has used her skills to dominate the welterweight division for over a decade.
The only time she met her match, in fact, was in August 2020, when Jessica McCaskill, the complete antithesis of Braekhus, managed to ruggedly outwork the champion in quite the upset. She then repeated the trick seven months later, leaving Braekhus without the titles she had possessed for so long and with a feeling she had never before experienced: defeat.
“I have made peace with that, for sure,” she said. “It was under the Covid restrictions and it was a rough time for me. There was a global pandemic and I could have done a lot of things differently. Nobody knew what was coming around the corner and there was no blueprint there.
“I can say for sure that if it wasn’t under those conditions I never would have lost either of those fights. Let’s just say it was crazy conditions and I was not in a good place. That’s why I can make peace with it. If I had lost to her under normal circumstances, I would never forgive myself.”
Time, it seems, serves many purposes. It can not only heal, as shown with Braekhus’ two defeats, but it can also humble and it can punish a boxer should they take it for granted or underestimate how quickly it can disappear. Braekhus, in her time, has achieved more than most, but knows that a lot of her greatest achievements are now behind her rather than in front of her. If she happens to beat Kozin on Saturday, it will rank high on her list of achievements, of course, yet Braekhus is not naïve or deluded enough to think she is capable of reaching the heights of old at the age of 44.
“It would definitely be in the top five [achievements], for sure – maybe top four,” she said of beating Kozin. “We’ll see how the fight goes.
“I think the first fight in Norway against Anne Sophie Mathise was a real highlight of my career. She was a knockout machine. She just ‘murdered’ Holly Holm in the ring and everybody thought I was going to lose against her. The only people who thought I could win were me and my team. That’s like three or four people. Everybody else thought I would lose.
“The fight against Keli Reis [in 2018] is also up there. She was an incredible fighter and that was a historic moment on HBO [Braekhus and Reis were the first female fighters to box on HBO]. The atmosphere at the StubHub [Center] was electric. We had the whole arena on their feet. It was a great fight; back and forth.
“It was also fun to beat up the Swedish girls. I liked that. They are so annoying.”
Even when reminiscing, and speaking of the past, Braekhus does so with the vivacity of somebody just starting out – with their whole future still ahead of them. This is perhaps because her experience in the sport has mostly been fruitful and positive and because she believes her future, rather than something to be feared, can be even richer without boxing. She is also content to know she is ending the relationship on her terms, not boxing’s, and that on Saturday she gets the final word.
“I haven’t fallen out of love with it at any point, but I’ve been pretty angry with it,” she said. “It’s not a love story without any spats. Of course we have had moments. It has at times been super rough. But because it is the love of your life, you kind of have to put up with it. It’s an extremely toxic relationship, but with a lot of good moments.”
If the relationship between Braekhus and boxing has occasionally been toxic, the “First Lady” now prepares to end it on her terms and return home, where she belongs. She might not be able to find places to hide in Norway, but it is there Braekhus will forever be welcomed, celebrated, and loved. It is there she can finally rest.
