All in a day’s work for Julia Lee

Julia Lee is the most interesting woman in the world.

There, I said it, and I mean it. How else would you describe someone who isn’t just making her way through the world of professional boxing but is also a full-time detective constable for the Metropolitan Police in London and a former commercial lawyer? Her parents must be very proud.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Lee laughs. “They think that I’ve made a series of terrible errors in life by leaving a big job.”

As a parent, I get it. As someone watching from the outside, I commend the 33-year-old for not only chasing her dreams in the ring, but for using her platform – and her day job – to help those in need. That sounds like a lot of work that isn’t like picking up an hourly rate as a lawyer.

“A lot of people ask me about balancing full-time work and boxing – two different careers – and I also work as an amateur coach. So I’ve founded it. 

People say if you’ve got something, you’ve got to give it absolutely everything that you’ve got to be able to succeed. You can’t focus on anything other than that one thing that you want to be great at. But there are several studies about the dangers of putting all your eggs in one basket. You become so dependent on succeeding in that one thing that it becomes difficult for you to look at it objectively. And especially if you are the athlete and you can’t detach yourself from that craft and judge yourself and evaluate yourself objectively, then I think that clouds your whole vision. So, for me, one of my aims and principles in life is that I want to be jack of all trades and master of all. I want to try and live my life to the max. And if that means I’ve got to balance some things, it just makes it a lot more exciting and if I don’t spend my time doing this, I’ll probably find time doing something else. So it might as well be this. I’ve got 24 hours in a day, let’s fill it up.”

Yes, Lee is not like the other boxers, but as she navigates the pro game after a solid amateur run that saw her win National titles at flyweight and bantamweight, she does so like her peers – staying ambitious while learning the ropes in the punch for pay ranks.

“Ideally, it’ll be a busy 2025,” said Lee, 3-0 with 1 KO thus far. “I have a mission to climb fast, so I want to get fights almost on a monthly basis. I think it will slow down towards the second half of the year, but at least in the first half of the year, I would like to get three, four fights in and get my numbers up, and then put myself in a stead where I can start challenging for really meaningful titles.”

That’s ambitious, but women generally move faster than their male counterparts, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Lee could be in the rankings and the title conversation at bantamweight at this time next year. Of course, a lot can happen in the next 12 months, but, in the meantime, the South Korea native is watching and taking it all in.

“I have a general awareness, so you look at what other people are doing and who’s out there,” said Lee. “And I don’t do it a lot, but I do like to compare myself to people who are out there, whether it’s in my weight category or above, just to kind of gauge the standard of women’s boxing and what level champions are at in terms of technical boxing skills, what the training is that you look at, how much they’re doing in terms of their business. But I think, for me, truth be told, I look at each fight as its own thing. So I have a team around me that does all the math, does the strategic positioning with the rankings and stuff and where to go next. I tend to focus very much on the fight and how happy I am with myself as an athlete. If I can get better, I’ll always get better, regardless of who else is out there.” 

The goal is always a world championship, and Lee has allowed herself to think of herself when it comes to this most individual of sports. But it’s not all about her as she goes through her paces in the gym and the ring. Instead, she fights for herself, her team, and the kids in the Rebels Boxing Gym in Southeast London.

“When I first started boxing and when I first started competing, I was just doing it because I was doing it,” she said. “There wasn’t a greater purpose. And I think one of the things that I realized after my very first fight since joining the police, and this was in 2021, I remember the first fight I had in the National Development Championships over here in the UK, which is like a National tournament. So you climb your way up to becoming a National champion through these fights. And the first one of those, I remember thinking, I need to win this because I need to show the kids that I work with, the people at the gym who’ve also come to support me, that this is what you can do. You can win this. They see me, they train with me, they know how much work I put in. So it was really, really important to me that I won that. And after the fight when I won it, that’s when it really dropped for me that I thought the reason why I’m able to do this is because I have that purpose that I didn’t have when I first started.”

That purpose has only grown stronger as youth crime in and around London has become even more prevalent, and oddly enough, it has brought all aspects of her life together in ways she never imagined when she first laced up the gloves.

“It’s not totally unrelated, the work that I do,” Lee said. “And in a wonderful set of coincidences and circumstances and partly by design, all the three major aspects of my work and my life and my training, they work with each other. They’re quite symbiotic. I’ve got the police work, where I work in the child exploitation department, so I work with a lot of young people in difficult situations like criminal exploitation, gang exploitation, drugs and robberies and all that knife crime. And then I use the amateur boxing coaching and my gym as a tool for diversion. So when I come across these young people – and some of them I work with for a couple of years or longer – I try and bring them into boxing to give them something else to do that’s going to give them different values, different mindsets, a different way of looking at themselves and a different meaning to violence. And then, obviously, the professional boxing for myself is a way for me to demonstrate through my own practice, through my own example and by training and being there with them in the trenches, that whatever you want to do, if you put in the effort, you can get there. And I want to be an embodiment of that. So all of that works together. and as much as it looks like you’re doing all these different things, they have a fundamental connection between them that makes it one whole inseparable thing.”

It’s a lot, physically and mentally. But Lee seems to be handling it all like a champ. That means there must be some escape at the end of the day, even if it’s just a well-deserved nap. Nah, Lee lives in a nap-free zone.

“It’s all life,” she said. “And I think it enriches my life to see everything. I’m greedy like that. I just want to gobble up as much information and experience as possible. There are ways to unwind, ways I try and capture my learning. Sometimes I dabble in writing poetry, where I try to capture some of the intensity of the experience in some kind of record form. And I play instruments.”

I stop her there because I’ve heard enough. She’s already making us all look lazy and unaccomplished, and now she’s a poet and musician, too?

Julia Lee is the most interesting woman in the world.