Women’s Ratings Update: Lauren Price enters the welterweight Top 5
The past two weeks have produced a few interesting fights in women’s boxing, although not many of them led to serious changes in our ratings.
The most outstanding one was a victory by Lauren Price over Kirstie Bavington in which Price, a former Olympian, improved to 4-0 and became British welterweight champion.
The win made Oshea Jones’ stay at No. 5 in the welter ratings a very short one indeed. Jones has entered only a week earlier, but Price was considered a slightly better fit for the position by the panel.
“The opponent Price defeated is much better than any fighter on Jones’s record,” argued columnist Mark Jones.
Historian Malissa Smith agreed by saying that “Price is an excellent fighter, and has made British boxing history by winning the first BBBofC women’s British boxing title. Price is an excellent boxer at 140, and in representing the UK at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games she came away with the middleweight gold medal. Jones will have her day again as she continues to contest at 147. We might even see a Price-Jones matchup down the line.”
“Lauren Price may only be 4-0, but she has an amateur background that includes a Tokyo Olympics Gold Medal with a dominant win over China!” added Lupi Gutierrez Beagle. “She’s also a world champion kick boxer. She is on another level.”
In other fronts, a few fights in lower divisions failed to produce any significant changes.
Germany’s Sarah Bormann scored a solid win over unbeaten Yadira Bustillos in the strawweight division, but she managed only to keep her already lofty position at No. 3.
“Sarah Bormann is an aggressive counter-puncher with a high guard,” noted Jones, who also added that “currently, she’s still looking up the rankings at Valle and Rupprecht.”
Canada’s Kim Clavel was also back in the W column after her first career loss, scoring a unanimous decision win over Naomi Arellano Reyes in a homecoming bout. Like Bormann, the general feeling was that Clavel was rated correctly at No. 4 in the junior flyweight division, right below the more proven Evelin Bermudez.
Diego M. Morilla writes for The Ring since 2013. He has also written for HBO.com, ESPN.com and many other magazines, websites, newspapers and outlets since 1993. He is a full member of the Boxing Writers Association of America and an elector for the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He has won two first-place awards in the BWAA’s annual writing contest, and he is the moderator of The Ring’s Women’s Ratings Panel. He served as copy editor for the second era of The Ring en Español (2018-2020) and is currently a writer and editor for RingTV.com.
