The undisputed Anthony Oluwafemi Olaseni Joshua OBE is a British professional boxer. He is a two-time former unified world heavyweight champion, having held the WBA, IBF, WBO, and IBO titles twice between 2016 and 2021.
At a regional level, he held the British and Commonwealth heavyweight titles from 2015 to 2016.
Anthony Oluwafemi Olaseni Joshua was born on 15 October 1989 in Watford, Hertfordshire, the son of Yeta and Robert Joshua. His mother is Nigerian, while his father is of Nigerian and Irish ancestry. Joshua’s Nigerian background can be expressly traced back to the Yoruba people, amongst whom he is of noble rank. His cousin, Ben Ileyemi, is also a professional boxer. The pair made their professional debuts together in 2013.
Joshua spent some of his early years in Nigeria as a boarding school student at Mayflower School in Ikenne. Following his parent’s divorce when he was 12, he returned to the UK halfway through Year Seven to join Kings Langley Secondary School.
Growing up on the Meriden Estate in Garston, Hertfordshire, he was called Femi by his friends and former teachers, due to his middle name, Oluwafemi. He excelled at football and athletics and broke his school’s Year Nine 100 m record with a time of 11.6 seconds.
In 2009, AJ won the Haringey box cup and re-performed the same triumph the succeeding year. Also that year, he emerged the winner of the ABA championship which he spectacularly did in bout 18 as a juvenile boxer then.
Prodigious and astonishing in some perception, Joshua rejected £500,000 to go white-collar that year. He later mooted that renouncing the bid wasn’t difficult because he didn’t engage in boxing for dough. The year after, he triumphed in the same tourney.
In 2010, Joshua’s boom in the ring favored him a shot on the GB boxing team, and downstream that year, he championed the GB amateur boxing championship, which he did by trouncing Amin Isa.
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