Ramla Ali was born in Mogadishu, fled Somalia as a child during the civil war and grew up in England as a refugee. On Sunday night in Arlington, Texas, she became a world champion twice over, taking the vacant WBO and IBF super bantamweight titles from unbeaten Mikiah Kreps on a split decision.
Ali was already the first boxer to compete at an Olympics for Somalia, at Tokyo 2020, and the first Somali woman to box professionally. Now she holds two of the sport’s four major belts at 122 pounds, and for Somali families in Minneapolis, Toronto and across the diaspora, the name on the belt is one of their own.
The win came the hard way, and not everyone agrees she earned it. Ali dropped Kreps in the third round with a left hand. Kreps, a former U.S. national champion who came in 11-0, took over the middle and late rounds with steady combinations to the head and body, and CompuBox counted more punches landed by Kreps than by Ali. Two judges scored the fight for Ali and one for Kreps. The Guardian headlined it a “highly controversial split decision.”
That dispute is part of the record and should not be hidden. Women’s boxing gets a fraction of the television time and judging scrutiny the men’s game does, and a split decision in a title fight with this much at stake invites exactly the kind of review it rarely gets. Kreps lost her first professional fight and a first world title shot in the same night. She deserves the same credit for how she fought as Ali gets for the knockdown.
What the judges’ cards cannot take away is the road Ali took to the ring. She won the English national title in 2016, took two professional losses on the way to the top and, in 2022, boxed in the first professional women’s fight held in Saudi Arabia. She also founded The Sisters Club in 2018, which gives Muslim women and survivors of violence a place to train, and she helped set up Somalia’s boxing federation.
A refugee from Mogadishu now holds two of the belts, and her record stands at 11-2. The argument over the decision will go on; the belts are hers on the official scorecards.
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