From a little-noticed gym on Skipton Road in Harrogate, Nathaniel Kalogiannidis is preparing for the fight of his life.
He’s one on the UK’s best practitioners of Thai boxing – or muay thai – and he’s just three bouts away from winning a six-figure contract with ONE Championship, the world’s biggest fight promotion organisation. If you’re a little hazy on the muay thai hierarchy, think Premier League.
When I meet him at the Kao Loi Gym, he’s relaxed after a week in Morocco, where he and his girlfriend went for a quick holiday following his last fight. Yet nine days after the bout in Manchester, his nose is still bruised and his knuckles still hurt, but he’s in good spirits, relentlessly cheerful and hitting the pads on full power.
He lost that fight, but the winner – the UK’s number one at 79kg – broke his hand on Nathaniel’s forehead, so he’s out of contention and the Harrogate man has a second chance. He’s not going to let it pass.
He said:
“I’ll be grabbing this opportunity with both hands. If it works out the way that I’m hoping, I should be going to Canada.”
Nathaniel Kalogiannidis punches opponent Dan Bonner during their recent bout in Manchester. Photo: Lamine Mersch.
His last fight was part of a four-man tournament where the winners were supposed to fight each other. They didn’t – “neither made it out” says Nathaniel – so that contest will happen next month at the O2 in London. The winner of that will head to Alberta, Canada in November. From there, the victor will be on a flight to Thailand.
If he ever feels daunted by how far there is yet to go to achieve his dreams – which appears unlikely, given his easy confidence – he should perhaps reflect on how far he’s come.
Born in Harrogate District Hospital, he spent his childhood in his father’s home country of Greece, where his dad introduced his “little hyperactive kid” to taekwondo. He won his first fight at the age of six and has been hooked ever since.
Nathaniel at the Kao Loi gym on Skipton Road in Harroagte.
He returned to Yorkshire and attended King James’s School in Knaresborough, always keeping up with the martial arts. Did he fight at school? He laughs:
“I tried to stay out of trouble! I’m sure there are some teachers who can remember a few instances.
“My first coach, who I had in Greece, was always encouraging us not to get into confrontations outside of the gym, so it’s something I’ve tried to stay away from. But as a teenage boy, I feel like that’s sometimes a little inevitable.”
Does he regard himself as a Harrogate fighter, or a Knaresborough fighter? Yorkshire, English, or Greek? He said:
“Harrogate, Yorkshire – I don’t want to sound too territorial, to be honest! I want to represent my team and the people who believe in me. That’s who I represent.”
Photo: Lamine Mersch.
He’s now a professional fighter and at the age of 25, he jokes that he’s “still got about 10 more years of punch-ups” in him. His record is 10 wins and five losses, but he says those don’t bother him. He ranks eighth in the UK at middleweight and his trajectory is ever upward.
He said:
“I pride myself on not cherry-picking opponents. I’ve never said no to any man who’s been offered to me in a fight. My first professional fight was against the UK number five ranked K1 fighter. All of my opponents have gone on to fight at international level or world level, so the guys that I’m getting beaten by – and it’s not by a lot – are very respectable opponents.
“I’ve never said no to anybody, because I’m not interested in polishing my record. I’m interested in being the guy who will just get in there, fight anybody and always make it an entertaining fight. Wins and losses don’t really matter to me too much.”
That may be so, but it doesn’t mean he’s not deadly serious about getting to Canada and then Thailand. He knows who he’s up against and he’s training hard, with between 10 and 12 sessions a week – two a day, six days a week, each an hour-and-a-half or two-and-a-half hours long. He said:
“We prefer quality over quantity. I don’t really need really long hours to be training – it’s just how good I can be for five three-minute rounds. That’s all that matters in a fight.”
Those 15 minutes are intense. The lead-up to a fight typically takes months, so there’s a lot of time to think about it. Nathaniel said:
“It’s really interesting, because the emotions up to the fight are never consistent. For a lot of fights I’ve been really nervous, about a month out. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions – it’s so inconsistent. Up, down, up, down. And then you get to walk into the ring, and there’s still a little bit of that anxiety and right before I walk out, my music comes on and everything leaves. It just goes and I’m just full of confidence. And I’m completely zoned into I have to do.
“It’s quite a beautiful thing for me because my brain’s quite full-on and I’ve got a lot of internal chatter, but to know that for however long the fight is, all I have to think about is me and the person stood in front of me. I don’t have to think about anything else. It sounds mental, but for me that’s a really, really peaceful place.”
It may feel peaceful, but that’s not how it looks. Muay thai is known as the ‘Art of Eight Limbs’ because it allows the use of eight “weapons” – the hands, the elbows, the knees, and the legs/feet – and the damage they can do can be spectacular. When Nathaniel’s last opponent broke his hand on his skull, the two of them were covered in his blood, and he needed seven staples in his forehead.
Nathaniel lost his last fight, but the winner broke his hand and will be unable to progress. Photo: Lamine Mersch.
Little wonder that fighters study each other intently to avoid the traps. In training, their sparring partners aim to imitate the fighting style of their next opponent, so that all the correct responses can be filed away and incorporated into the game plan. The last thing a fighter wants is to have to think too hard when in the ring. Nathaniel said:
“You put it all into your autopilot so you don’t have to think. I’ve had times where I have been really thinking and you fall behind. You don’t have any momentum – it’s gone. Gone. It’s like a meditation – you can’t afford to be stuck on any single thought.”
He says the worst feeling is finishing a fight and thinking he could have done more. It only happened once and he’s never let it happen again. He said:
“I know for a fact that I leave absolutely everything in the ring. I give absolutely everything in my preparation. Anything I can possibly do, anything that I can control, I do 100%. I don’t do half measures.”
But then again, the other fighters are doing the same thing, so is there ever bad blood? Trash talking has become de rigueur in boxing, so is it the same in muay thai? He said:
“Muay thai is a much more traditional, respectful support, and I’ve always had respect between me and my opponents.
“It doesn’t always mean that I’ve liked the guys who I’ve fought, before or after, but they’ve never been anything but respectful after the fight. A lot of the time it might not even be a personal thing, but when you have the same dream as somebody else, it’s very hard to get along with them. We both want the same thing. We’ve both put a lot into what we’re doing.
“But I’ve met some of the nicest people I’ve ever met through combat sports. To go through 15 minutes of doing what we do in a ring to then hug it out covered in blood and have a drink, which I have done with a lot of my opponents – a drink and a chinwag after – is really, really quite a beautiful thing, I think.”
That feeling is, of course, intensified by victory – winning, he says, is like an addictive drug. He said:
“It’s an incredible feeling getting your hand raised. I wish I could bottle it up and give it to people. But I can’t – it’s the product of giving something 100%, chasing something that you love, and coming out the other side victorious. It’s got to be one of the best feelings in life.”
Whether he wins, loses or draws at the O2 next month – he says “When I win” – there’s no chance that Harrogate and Knaresborough’s hometown challenger will throw in the towel on his career anytime soon. Had he lost that first bout aged six, he would still have kept fighting. He said:
“I’ve lost loads of times and there have been times when people have told me to stop, and I could have just quit and done something else as a career. But I’ve never wanted to do anything else.
“I really feel like this is my calling and this is what I was put on this planet to do. And to use my platform to help and influence other people through combat sports. So, one way or another I’d have found myself back inside of a ring!”
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