Mangte Chungneijang Mary Kom grew up in a farming family in Manipur, in a part of India where boxing facilities and funding for women's sport were almost nonexistent, and where the idea of a woman boxing at all raised eyebrows in her community.
She trained anyway, often hiding it from her father initially, believing the sport wasn't 'respectable' for a girl. She won her first world championship in 2002, and kept winning — but in 2007, she gave birth to twin boys, and many assumed that would be the natural end of her competitive career.
Instead, within about six months of childbirth, she was back in serious training, rebuilding a body and a level of conditioning that had taken years to develop, around a newborn's feeding schedule and almost no sleep. Critics and even some supporters quietly assumed a mother of twins in her late twenties was past her competitive peak.
In 2012, at thirty years old and after giving birth to a third child in the interim, Mary Kom won a bronze medal at the London Olympics, becoming the first Indian woman boxer to medal at the Games — a comeback built on training sessions squeezed between diaper changes and a refusal to accept that motherhood and elite competition were mutually exclusive.