Delfine Persoon: ‘I had to take my holiday for this fight’

She may be about to compete in one of the most significant women’s boxing matches in history, but Delfine Persoon had to take annual leave just to be here.

Delfine Persoon: ‘I had to take my holiday for this fight’

She may be about to compete in one of the most significant women’s boxing matches in history, but Delfine Persoon had to take annual leave just to be here.

The police officer from the Belgian province of West Flanders puts her WBC lightweight title on the line against WBA, WBO, and IBF champion Katie Taylor at Madison Square Garden tomorrow night in a fight which will determine the best of the division.

It is the first time Persoon, a former judo specialist, has ever boxed outside of Belgium, and some bookies have made her as long as 10/1 to leave New York as the undisputed champion.

But given her journey to the Big Apple, it should probably not come as a surprise that Persoon appears to be taking the whole occasion in her stride.

“I had to take my holiday for this fight,” she says. “I always do. I never take vacation for vacations. Every day of vacation is for training, that’s just the way I live.

We are in Belgium where there are no facilities for pro boxing so if you want to train you have to take your vacation time.

“I normally get 32 days per year, but this time I got 55 days and my boss also gave me some extra days.”

The lightweight champion has happily played her part in the promotion which will earn her a career high payday.

Although she will only have to box for a maximum of 20 minutes tomorrow night in their 10x2s contest, Persoon sees her encounter with Taylor as the culmination of a decade’s graft.

Her passion for boxing has burned so brightly that she has dedicated almost every non-working hour to the sport, and there are not too many of those.

But it is her life juggling boxing with police work and what she describes as ‘normal life’ which Persoon believes has made her ‘harder’ than Taylor, and therefore primed to cause an upset.

“The difference with me is maybe the way I’ve made it here to the highest level,” she explained. “I’ve had a long, harder way to do this compared to her.

“Every day I have to work, after work I go straight to training. I run and then go to the gym then when you get back you have your food and live your normal life.

“Katie Taylor says ‘amateurs wasn’t that easy, I only got paid €40,000 per year’. I say, I work every day and I don’t get paid that much by the end of the year. So she got more money just to do her passion than I do from working every day.

“That’s the big difference between her and I. For me it’s something I really want and it’s my passion, otherwise I would have stopped a long time ago.

"Because you can’t see your friends or your family because in the hours when you’re at home you have to train.”

Persoon has been the WBC champion for five years and nine successful defences, most of which have come at the top of cards she has staged herself in Belgium.

“I’d be in work at six o’clock in the morning so you have to get up at 4.30am,” Persoon says.

“You come home at two, at three you go running, then you have food, then you go to the gym — at our own club, because there is no facility.

“When you’re at home: ‘Oh, we have to look for a fight, we have to look for a sponsor, we have to answer emails.’ At 11pm you have to go to bed, and at 4.30am you go back to work.

It makes you hard, eh? If you are not hard, it’s not possible to get this opportunity.

The 34-year-old said every cent banked for her part in tomorrow’s unification will be spent on a gym she plans to build on land acquired around 20km from Bruges.

“I will always stay as a police officer, but I will train people to go the right way,” she adds.

“Boxing is good because it can show that you can fight not only in the street, but fight in the ring.

“We want to build a better place so we can train — not just for me anymore, but for the people after me also.”

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