The general consensus is that everyone has a smashy-smashy phase. That’s exactly how Elena Cresci says it – “everyone has a smashy-smashy phase” – as if it makes total sense.
“You don’t realise how hard you’re hitting,” Cresci explains calmly over a lemon bar and a latte. “But you’re hitting really f***ing hard.”
The wisdom seems sensible enough. A hallowed form of kickboxing originating from Thailand, Muay Thai is a combat sport where elbows and knees to the skull are currency, blood and bruising are medals in their own right and headbutts are a type of elegance. That fighters, particular newcomers, can periodically slip into an unconscious state of supercharged Hulk mode is understandable.
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Still, on first meet, you would never consider for a second that the Dinas Powys native and freelance videographer currently with Google's Arts and Culture TikTok boasts a smashy-smashy bone in her 5ft 3in body, let alone a burgeoning professional Muay Thai career in the UK or a freshly-seized belt from the World Boxing Council in the English flyweight division.
No, Cresci is powerfully genial. Within seconds of her arrival to her former karate club in Barry, Goshin and Kudo Academy, the quiet car-garage-cum-MMA-dojo takes on new life, almost enough for us to forget that the heating is not on, it’s December and outside, the sky is contemplating Armageddon.
That’s the aftereffect of the Welshwoman bounding up the stairs in white platform Devon Heart Dr. Martens, a pair of blue jeans and a long violet coat with matching fur trim on the wrists and neck. Atop her fluorescent copper fringe — “my Christmas fringe,” she calls it — the 33-year-old dons a leopard-print beret, and it suddenly becomes difficult to shake the sensation that we’re holding court with the real-life Daphne from Scooby Doo. Only this is the Daphne who can jam her knee into your head with unnerving accuracy.
It doesn’t take long for that small caveat to be underscored. Within moments of reaching the top step, Cresci fishes out her emerald-coloured WBC title belt from her purse and proceeds to cheerfully show off a gnarly gash in her skull from an elbow accrued in a training session downstairs the week prior.
“I’ve been in two bare elbow fights this year and I never got cut, but one round here and I’m bleeding everywhere.” She releases a laugh: a roaring, infectious thing. She lifts a pair of boxing gloves out of her bag. Blood lightly stains the fists.
The episode is almost jarring. Almost. Cresci is no novice to martial arts, earning a brown belt in karate through sixth form before becoming disenthralled with the enterprise at university. Yet, while any of Cresci’s former school teachers would be pleasantly shocked to find Cresci touting a title belt around in her purse (“I was not a sporty child”, she declares), it would be remiss to believe that any of Cresci’s hyper-gregariousness or glamour is part of some clandestine ruse to disarm her opponents.
On a regular basis, Cresci’s coach, current British Muay Thai male champion Amro Ghanem, has found himself exasperated in his attempts to keep Cresci from flashing a beaming smile in her intended-to-be-intimidating pre-fight photographs.
“When I try to do a serious face I look like…” Cresci hovers over her words for a moment as she pulls out her training gear: a sports bra and silky white shorts emblazoned with the Welsh flag. “You know the human embodiment of a chihuahua?”
It has been a headlong year for Cresci. A four-year journey which began on a whim at a White Collar Fight Club event – an eight-week long camp for working professionals interested in gleaning a first taste for boxing or Thai boxing techniques – crested into a first year of professional status last January with Team Tieu in central London. In the ensuing 12 months, she competed in her first international fight, unabashedly hopped into the ring with bigger and more experienced opponents, dished out defeats, incurred some heartbreak and won a WBC champions’ belt in the English flyweight division against one of the most prestigious opponents.
The journey has been fierce, wildly unexpected and, in a particularly tumultuous last six months, emotional as Cresci juggled full-time freelancing, Muay Thai and the invariable curveballs a cost of living crisis hurls into the mix.
“Whenever Amro is asked by people what I’m like, he tells them I’m the girl who hits hard and cries a lot.” Another laugh escapes as she concedes: “He’s not wrong.”
Indeed, Cresci and Ghanem’s working relationship began over tears more than five years ago, as Cresci sobbed on a treadmill midway through her first White Collar Fight Club camp after a particularly disappointing sparring session against a woman she would eventually have to hop into the ring with. It was 2018 and Cresci was suffering from anxiety and panic attacks which had begun to mount since moving to London, a period of her life defined by significant unhappiness.
While working on The Guardian's social media team, Cresci was responsible for sourcing and watching the violent viral videos released by various terror groups. The impact of the videos combined with a lack of support wreaked havoc on her mental health, she says.
“Mentally it was taxing but then also equally feeling a bit of a fraud because there are war reporters who don’t get any support for this kind of s**t so you feel like 'how can I, who hasn’t even left my country, feel this way?'” Cresci recalls. “It’s only until the last four or five years that it is a legitimate thing that happens.”
She eventually left The Guardian for Channel 4, where a former boss forwarded her an advert for White Collar. Cresci emphasises that while she was not in a good way when Muay Thai fell into her life, she was in a good enough place to embark on the challenge. That distinction, she says, is pivotal when it comes to discussions around mental health and sport. “I was in a bad place mentally, but you know when it comes to mental health coverage, sometimes it’s as reductive as: Depressed? Go for a run,” she says with faux chirp. “You need to be in a space not where you’re 100% well but you’re well enough to get out of bed and go for the run. You need to be okay enough to do that.”
Muay Thai offered an outlet but it was no panacea. Cresci points to her sob session on the treadmill. Now, the memory sends her into another bout of laughter but at the time, it felt anchoring. With some training from Ghanem, Cresci won her first White Collar fight.
“It was a shock win but looking back, technically, it was the worst fight,” she says with a smile. “Literally handbag to thorn. But it was showing that I had that grit. You can be the most technical fighter in the world but if you don’t have heart it can be really hard because you get pulled into deep waters in a fight and if you don’t have heart to get out of it, then…” She trails off and shrugs. “That’s what I proved with White Collar.”
That grit would crescendo this year. While Cresci went professional, the UK’s professional scene is a far cry from that in Thailand, the sport’s zenith where full-time careers can be mined. In the UK, for those not in the very top echelon, life is a balancing act.
Come August 2022, the delicate balance Cresi had teased was tested. As the cost of living crisis loomed, freelance projects such as those with Netflix's YouTube channel began to peter out; other agencies offered fractions of her daily rate. The dearth of work threatened to derail Cresci’s hard yards, while a loss in her first international fight in Spain had inflicted her with an innate fear of losing tight matches on the road, stirring her to train even harder.
Gearing up for a first A-Class (the UK’s elite level that allows bare elbows) fight against former British ICO title holder and Thailand two-time stadium belt winner Yasmin Nazary in October, Cresci was hit with an eviction notice from her landlord detailing the sale of the flat. As if to ramp up the dramatics, her flatmate was about to undergo major surgery the following week, leaving Cresci scrambling through London trying to find a roof for the pair.
Weeks before her WBC title fight in December against 18-year-old rising star and Olympic hopeful Ellie Pardy, Cresci was moving house and calculating the feasibility of her bills, all while training for the biggest fight of her career.
Cresci smiles about the “total f***ing chaos” now, which feels inherently Cresci. She emerged victorious from both fights, first earning a ginormous egg on her forehead from Nazary’s downward elbow — “I looked like Quasimodo for weeks”— before lifting the WBC title above her head as she broke into tears after convincing herself she had lost to Pardy midway through her fight. The title represents the apex of Cresci's career to date and culminates a year defined by immense growth.
“No one else on my team has had the opportunity to fight for a WBC title,” she says. “I felt like there was a lot of pressure because I didn’t want to waste the opportunity that was given me by letting anyone down. But at the same time, I had all this other stuff going on. I was worrying about how I’m going to pay my bills. But I got to a point where I thought, I’m better than a bad couple of weeks. This is too big of an opportunity. You have to stop being…such a d***head.” She laughs: “You have to stop.”
The temptation arises to suggest that it is a Muay Thai lesson, to leave one’s baggage at the metaphorical door in the same way fighters have to leave their literal shoes and socks on the floor before stepping onto the mat.
“Definitely in the beginning, I felt like that’s what it got me to do,” Cresci says. “Some days I find it really easy to have everything at the door, walk into the gym, do your stuff and then pick it back up, but it’s also weird being open about it. I feel like there is such a stereotype with fighters that you have to be strong and this and that, and in and amongst the strength you’re not allowed to show any weakness.
“I think acknowledging, 'no, that was really hard and I did it' is a strength in itself. Anyone who pretends they’re strong all the time, you never have bad days, it works for the Instagram algorithm but in real life that’s not what inspires other people. What inspires other people is overcoming adversity.”
That is not to say Cresci is over her crying spells. A fight almost always ends in bawling tears, regardless of the outcome. Her pre-fight routine vacillates between nervous vomiting and pacing. Her freelance career still suffuses her with indelible stress levels.
Cresci harbours no embarrassment over sharing any of this in no uncertain detail, in the same way she plainly declares she hasn’t an ounce of pleasing aesthetic in her fighting style save the one time she flawlessly executed a jump-switch kick, which she shamelessly plugs at any opportunity. "It is the most aesthetically pleasing thing I've ever done in any capacity," she says.
The candour is refreshing but also a source of power. If Cresci can speak openly about her foibles, what’s the difference in hopping into a ring with Nazary, a fighter boasting 47 more professional fights to their name? “If you put that on paper, I’d had three professional fights by that point, she had 50-plus, I don’t think there are many other people who would’ve taken that,” she says. “But I thought, f*** it. It’s a good opportunity.”
The latter part of that sentiment cuts as good as any. A second year of professional fighting will be certainly be catalysed by it.
But it's also a mindset she hopes to impress in women and girls who enter the sport, especially as female fighters are afforded more access and airtime. Previously, female fighters were precluded from climbing over the ropes like the men. In Thailand, many stadiums outright refused to host female fights. Cresci does not need pressing to recall the karate classes glaringly lacking in other girls.
“People look up to you but sometimes you feel like an imposter because you’re like 'I'm deeply broken'," she says with her delightful mixture of self-deprecation and sincerity. “But I think that helps sometimes. If I’m teaching someone having their first amateur fight and they’re finding it really difficult, I can speak to them better than someone who isn’t really open about those struggles. I can say 'yeah, it’s hard, but it's conquerable'.”
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