Claressa Shields: ‘You gotta be great to survive all I did – Savannah Marshall is gonna be shocked’

“I’m never going to allow any of the kids in my family to go through what I went through,” Claressa Shields says quietly as she turns her intense gaze on me. The 27-year-old American, who fights Savannah Marshall in a riveting bout which headlines the historic all-women boxing card at the O2 Arena on Saturday night, has already told me about her harrowing past. She grew up in abject poverty in Flint, Michigan, in an area which remains one of the most deprived in America, and she was raped systematically from the age of five.

Shields pauses and then, with blazing eyes, continues to remember everything she endured. “I know what it was like. I know how it can make you very, very angry. I don’t want those kids to have the anger I had because I was very, very mad growing up. If I hadn’t have found boxing, who knows where I’d be at, with the anger I had inside of me.”

The buildup to Shields v Marshall has been bitter and affected by last month’s postponement. The fight was meant to take place on Saturday 10 September but, after the boxers had weighed-in on the Friday, it was then decided to push it back five weeks following the death of the Queen. Both women are unbeaten as professionals and their antipathy towards each other is plain. It is also elevated by the fact this contest is as interesting as any fight in world boxing, featuring men or women, this year. Yet, beyond confirming that women’s boxing now has a gravitas and a commercial clout that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, Shields and Marshall are fixated with each other.

Shields has only lost one fight, either as an amateur or a pro in a glittering boxing career, and it hurts her to the core. Marshall beat her as an amateur in China, in the early stages