The Good Fight

Zinnat Ferdous ’16 was not dreaming of becoming an Olympian in early 2017. All she wanted was to get her boyfriend, Edmund, a nice gift for his birthday.

She chuckled when Edmund shadowboxed at stoplights, in the bathroom, and “anytime there was a void.” Until she watched him pound a heavy bag during a visit to the gym, she had no idea she had been dating an amateur boxer for the past few months. So when one of his friends told her that a world championship fight was coming to Madison Square Garden, she splurged on two tickets about a dozen rows from the ring. 

Seeing two elite fighters battle on the world’s grandest stage, she says, was intoxicating. This wasn’t just two people pummeling one another, she thought. This was a strategy game. 

Seven years after that fight — and just four years after punching a bag for the first time — Ferdous is looking to qualify for the Paris Olympics as a member of the Bangladesh national team. She would be the first woman boxer to represent a country of over 170 million and the most populous country to never win an Olympic medal. And she’ll do it while managing a $70 million advertising program at her full-time job at Google. 

“My friends and family would like to describe me as an extreme person,” Ferdous says. “I think when I take a liking to anything that I do, I really go in and I get the job done.”

For an athlete to qualify for the Olympics usually means a lifetime of training. Some athletes are able to try other sports to keep their dreams alive. Qualifying for the Olympics when you’ve never played an organized sport is highly unusual, if not unprecedented.

But it’s within reach for the 30-year-old Ferdous, the daughter of two Bangladesh natives who settled in Astoria, Queens, in the late 1980s. Since partaking in her first boxing match in November 2021, Ferdous has medaled in six amateur tournaments and defeated some of the top-ranked American boxers in her weight category. She became the first woman boxer to represent Bangladesh on the international stage at the Asian Games last October and will travel to Thailand at the end of May for her last chance to qualify. 

In under three years, Ferdous has logged 30 bouts in rings from Toledo, Ohio, to the Dominican Republic and Russia. Her trainer, Colin Morgan, can’t remember such a grueling schedule in his four-decade career.

“I would prefer if she gets some rest, but I don’t think that’s possible in New York City,” Morgan says. “You’ve got to work, then you’ve got to train, and you’ve got to go home and work again and then come back to the gym.”

Ferdous grew up around a lot of boys — a brother, and male cousins who lived just blocks away — and gravitated toward physical sports, but her household had a strict curfew well before sundown and emphasized academics, not recreational sports. 

“When I brought home a 90,” Ferdous says, “they asked where the 100 was.” 

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Still, Ferdous always loved a challenge, and she found plenty once she arrived at Barnard. She immediately sensed the rigor of the school’s academic environment by witnessing the study habits of her freshman roommate, who had aspirations of being a doctor. After graduating with a psychology degree, Ferdous dabbled in the worlds of fashion (an internship at Marc Jacobs) and finance before choosing the world of tech sales.

To excel in this field requires lots of cold calling, engaging even the fussiest and most indecisive clients, and executing sales under pressure. Some projects require swagger, others persistence. All of them call for confidence and preparation, lessons Ferdous would take to the ring when she’d begin her boxing career five years later.

“I believe that performance starts the second your ring walk starts,” Ferdous says.

In 2019, Edmund introduced Ferdous to his longtime trainer, Danny Nicholas, who quipped, “I don’t train cardio boxers. So if you’re interested in fighting, let me know.” By now, boxing was a shared obsession between them, and Ferdous understood why her boyfriend — soon to become her husband — kept training even though he hadn’t fought competitively in years. Being a fighter meant early wake-ups for training and long sessions dedicated to minute details of footwork and punch delivery. The physical demands were grueling, but the payoff was addicting. The tactical side of boxing was like learning to play chess, except a wrong move meant getting hit in the face.

Her older brother loved that she had found a new passion. Her parents were concerned that the amount of time she was dedicating to this hobby would interfere with her work at Google.

“I would tell them I was going to train and gradually let them know details but not let them know about fighting,” Ferdous says. “I’d prime them in conversations and tell them, ‘I’m thinking about fighting.’ They were completely against it.”

Under Nicholas’s tutelage, Ferdous learned how to train like a fighter, but her progress was derailed by the pandemic and a foot injury. Once Ferdous returned from surgery and the city reopened, Nicholas took her to train at Bout Fight Club in lower Manhattan, where she met Morgan. 

In the summer of 2021, Morgan watched Ferdous spar with a woman several inches taller and about 40 pounds heavier than her. “She doesn’t really know how to punch yet,” Morgan thought to himself. “But that other girl isn’t hitting her either.”

“This girl was trying some really big punches [on Zinnat],” Morgan says. “And [Zinnat] just makes sure she isn’t getting hit. … Her defensive skills were already really good. She just needed somebody to teach her some offense, and she could turn into something really special.”

After seeing her spar, Morgan huddled with Nicholas and then approached Ferdous: If you train with me, he told her, I can get you to the 2024 Olympics.

“In my head, I’m like, ‘All right, I don’t know who this guy is,’” Ferdous says. “And so I quickly went back home and looked him up.”

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She found a trainer with over 40 years of experience who has trained multiple professional world champions and several amateur gold medalists. Still, the most decorated women fighters in the world had logged dozens of competitive fights or had been raised in the sport since they were young. Ferdous had little formal training, no official fights, and no competitive athletic background to speak of. 

To be ready for a competitive fight — much less dream of qualifying for the Olympics — Ferdous would need to dedicate several hours of training a day to achieve and maintain proper fitness, on top of mastering the technical instruction that could get tedious. And all of it would have to be done outside of her job at Google, where she had recently been promoted.

As Ferdous puts it, she had to scratch the itch. She wanted to compete. 

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“I think I quickly realized there’s not many people that have my profile,” Ferdous says. “I would say the primary ethnic groups for females [in boxing] tend to be white, Black, Hispanic. And then there’s this Bengali Muslim, first-generation American girl that comes on the scene, and they’re like, ‘Who is this?’”

Since starting to train with Morgan in late 2021, Ferdous’s weekday evenings and weekend afternoons have been spent in a gym sandwiched between a law firm and a chiropractor’s office on the second floor of a lower Manhattan office building. 

Over three hours, Ferdous will work with various punching bags: heavy bags that stand 5 feet tall and weigh around 50 pounds to practice power punches and speed bags shaped like raindrops that weigh just 8 ounces for quick hits. That comes after about 15 minutes of jumping rope to warm up and perfect the lateral bounce required to glide across the ring. 

Then it’s time to shadowbox. She works the forms of her jab (quick, straight strikes), hooks (quick, rounded punches), and uppercuts (long and powerful U-shaped blows). In between the ropes, Morgan offers focused instruction on minute details. During one session, he guides Ferdous and a few fighters on proper pivot form to assure that the fighter is ideally positioned to evade an opponent’s punch and ready to throw one. After that, Ferdous won’t just spar with her female teammates, she’ll do two three-minute rounds with a male teammate who is undefeated in 15 professional fights. Once the sparring ends, Ferdous hits the ground to do around 30 minutes of calisthenics. Ferdous never sits or stands still for more than a few seconds throughout the entire session.

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“It’s like climbing stairs one at a time, you can’t just try to jump from the bottom and go to the top,” Morgan says about Ferdous. “But at the same time, I’m doing [training] at a fast rate because there’s not much time [to qualify for the Olympics].”

Focused training will build technical proficiency and stamina, but it doesn’t teach you how to handle prefight nerves or how to recover after getting hit in the face. So Ferdous scheduled her first fight in November 2021 at a charity event called Haymakers for Hope. Her parents remained resistant to how much time she spent in the ring, but she convinced them to attend after raising over $30,000 to commemorate her aunt who died of stomach cancer. 

Even before the fight began, her mother grew emotional, and when Ferdous won by unanimous decision, she shed tears of pride, Ferdous says. When she invited them to watch her fight at Madison Square Garden as part of the New York City Golden Gloves tournament, her father pulled her aside and told her, “I thought you looked like Muhammad Ali out there.”

“Sometimes they’ll still ask me when I am going to stop with this stuff,” Ferdous says. “But I think they understand now that this is more than a hobby. It’s a passion. And they see me representing Bangladesh.”

By spring 2023, Ferdous thought she was going for a chance to represent the United States, but Morgan lobbied for her to get dual citizenship with Bangladesh since she was a first-generation immigrant. She leveraged the cold-calling skills she refined at her first tech sales job to connect with a former Google colleague named Bickey Russell, a former cricket player with friends who were connected to the Bangladesh Olympic Association. By July, she was flying with Morgan to meet the association in Dhaka, where security guards picked them up. “It felt like I had already won a gold medal,” Ferdous jokes.

The federation welcomed Ferdous but wanted to see her train and fight before officially granting her the opportunity to represent the country. She arrived at the Muhammad Ali Boxing Stadium in Dhaka, where only male fighters trained. After watching her sparring sessions with two male fighters and exhibition bouts with two female athletes, the federation wanted Ferdous’s citizenship expedited so she could qualify for the upcoming Asian Games. 

Since then, Ferdous has adjusted to the unexpected media scrutiny that comes with becoming an Olympic hopeful in a country with no history of success. When her status as a Bangladeshi athlete was confirmed, outlets swarmed her with interview requests and buzzed that this might be the person to get the country an Olympic medal. 

But when Ferdous lost to the eventual bronze medalist at the Asian Games in September, the questions were harsh and direct from the couple dozen Bangladeshi reporters in attendance.

“I was just mobbed with questions like, ‘What could you have done better?’ ‘Why did you lose?’” Ferdous says. “These were harsh questions, and you have to hold your composure. I never thought about training or preparing for that.”

She asked Inam Ahmed, the chairman of the Bangladesh Cricket Board and a mentor since Ferdous joined the national team, how it was possible to handle such intense media scrutiny if she didn’t win every fight. He explained that Bangladesh is in its infancy of understanding how to follow sports. As the sports industry grows, he told her, they will come to realize that wins and losses are part of the athlete’s journey.

Even with the pressure building before her final chance to qualify in May, Ferdous marvels at how her life — and perspective — have changed since she chose to pursue boxing not even five years ago.

“I remember after one of the training sessions in Bangladesh, this little girl came up to me and said, ‘I never knew girls can punch like that; I thought only men can,’” Ferdous says. “And I think that one instance showed me that what I’m doing — it’s kind of more than just me, right?” 

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