Cheavon Clarke: Olympian on dodging death, bouncing back and going pro

Before the phrase was popular, Cheavon Clarke was talking about «levelling up». It was how he got started in boxing.

Clarke was trying to raise his game as a footballer when he joined an amateur boxing club, aged 18.

«My ethos is to level up,» he says. «I used to play football and I played at a decent level, a reasonable level. I could hold my own. I just wanted to get fitter so I could go a little bit harder than everybody else because I'm always trying to level up.

»That's how it happened. It wasn't like I planned to go with boxing. It was just by accident."

But after a first session together, Clarke was taken aside by Jason Weeks, one of his amateur trainers.

«He goes, 'You're really good you are. You could be a world champion,'» Clarke remembers. «In my head I was thinking this guy's chatting garbage. He could see something I couldn't.

»Jason was the actual coach that made me think, 'Oh yeah, I could be something.'"

Now 31, Clarke has been a two-time national amateur champion and a Tokyo Olympian. On Sunday, he faces his first professional bout, at London's O2 Arena — taking on Croatia's Tony Visic as part of a card topped by Lawrence Okolie's cruiserweight world title defence against Michal Cieslak.

«I could tell you that I never had an idea about boxing, all of the whole Matchroom [his promoter] and all the other people that play a part in boxing,» he says.

«That's all just recent. I never had a dream of going to the Olympics, I never had a dream of being a boxer -it's all become a part of the journey.»

Clarke competed at the 2014 Commonwealth Games for Jamaica, where he was born, but suffered disappointment in Glasgow, going out in the first round. He drifted from the sport. Weeks and Lenny Trust, his coaches at the