Rosie Eccles: “Covid has attacked my nervous system,” says Olympic boxer

Rosie Eccles says it feels “surreal” to finally be selected for the Olympics after four bouts of Covid-19 attacked her nervous system and left her fearing for her boxing career.

The 27-year-old from Caldicot in South Wales missed the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo after suffering severe pain in her right arm and neck ahead of the Olympic qualifiers in London.

It was later discovered that she had contracted Covid in early 2020, which subsequently affected her brachial plexus – a network of nerves in her shoulder.

The same thing has happened three more times since then and Eccles began to doubt whether her Olympic dream would ever come true.

“It’s been a long road,” she told BBC Sport Wales.

“I always felt like I was running towards it and it was getting closer – but someone was always pushing it a little bit further away.

“It’s surreal to look back at everything that happened and think, ‘I actually got through that, and now I’m here.'”

Even as a teenager, Eccles struggled with health problems.

A few months after putting on boxing gloves for the first time at age 15, she was diagnosed with a heart condition that required surgery.

At the age of 21, she was nominated for the first time for Wales at the Commonwealth Games, but had to settle for silver in the welterweight category after losing in the final to England’s Sandy Ryan.

She already had her sights set on something bigger: the Olympic Games. The boxer known as “Right Hand Rosie” began 2020 with the intention of securing her place in Tokyo.

But after catching a “mysterious virus” at a training camp in America, Eccles noticed severe pain in her right arm. Within a few weeks, she had lost 80% of the function of her arm.

On the third day, the event had to take place behind closed doors due to the coronavirus outbreak. On the fourth day, the event was cancelled, and within weeks, the Olympics themselves were postponed.

Eccles was plunged into lockdown like everyone else. As painful as it was to miss her first Olympics, her right arms and neck were also in pain. She began to fear she would never be herself again, let alone a boxer.

“It cost me my Olympic dream,” she continued. “But the lowest point was probably the lockdown and dealing with the situation. You train so hard for something and not only have you not done it, but now you can’t train anywhere and have an injury that you don’t know what it is.”

“We didn’t know if it would ever be fixed. And could it actually even affect normal life? At the time I thought, ‘What’s the point of this? It seems so unfair.’ But it gave me a whole different appreciation for what boxing had given me, that I really wasn’t done yet.

“Coming back from that has given me a whole new fire.”

Eventually she was able to resume training, but Covid continued to impact the sporting calendar and Eccles never got another chance to qualify for Tokyo.

In June 2021, she was at the GB Boxing gym when 11 of her teammates posed for photos on the day their Olympic selection was confirmed.

Eccles looked on enviously and admits that she cried the whole way home.

Then she contracted Covid again in 2022 and again it affected her brachial plexus – but this time without pain. She recovered more quickly and won Commonwealth gold for Wales in Birmingham in the summer.

The following summer, she contracted Covid again, this time in her left arm. There were only 10 weeks left until the European Games – the first opportunity to qualify for the Olympic Games in Paris.

She admits she is not 100% fit, but she secured her place in Paris with a quarter-final win over Ireland’s Amy Broadhurst before moving to the UK herself.

Eccles had finally done it.

“It’s given me a lot in terms of resilience,” Eccles said, “but it’s also given me this strange belief that no matter what happens, I can get through really difficult situations.”

“I’m a little bit scared (of contracting Covid) that it might happen before the Games. But I also have the fundamental belief now that no matter what happens, I can find a way to do it with a body that’s not quite 100 percent.

“It gave me a strange confidence.”