Thomas Nicholls ( Eng. Thomas Nicholls ; October 12, 1931 ) is an English boxer of the lightest and semi-lightweight categories, in the 1950s he played for the national teams of Great Britain and England. Silver medalist at the Summer Olympics in Melbourne, European champion, four-time national championship champion, participant in many international tournaments and match meetings.
 Thomas Nichols | ||||||||||||||
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| general information | ||||||||||||||
| Full name | English Thomas nicholls | |||||||||||||
| Citizenship |  Great Britain | |||||||||||||
| Date of Birth | October 12, 1931 (87 years old) | |||||||||||||
| Place of Birth | ||||||||||||||
| Weight category | featherweight (57 kg) | |||||||||||||
| Team | Sankeys abc | |||||||||||||
Medals
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Biography
Thomas Nichols was born on October 12, 1931, and grew up in a poor large family (he had six sisters and one brother). He began to actively engage in boxing at the age of fifteen, trained at the Spankeys amateur boxing club in Wellington, Shropshire , then continued training while serving in the Royal Air Force . He achieved his first serious success in 1951, when he became the champion of the English Boxing Association in the bantamweight title and visited the European Championship in Milan, where he nevertheless quickly dropped out of the fight for medals, losing to the Irishman William Kelly in the opening fight.
The following season he again won the championship of England and thanks to a series of successful performances he was awarded the right to defend the honor of the country at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki . But here he was not lucky with a draw - in the first match he met future Olympic champion from Finland Pentti Hämäläinen and lost to him by unanimous decision.
Further in Nichols' career came a certain decline, he rose to featherweight, but for a long time did not show decent results. In the finals of the 1953 national championship, he was disqualified for intentional headshots, while the 1954 season was almost completely missed due to injury. Despite this, in 1955 he nevertheless regained his championship title, re-entered the main team and triumphantly performed at the European Championships in West Berlin, from where he brought the gold dignity award (in the semifinals he took revenge from Hämäläinen, and in the decisive match against 3-2 defeated the titled Soviet boxer Alexander Zasukhin ).
In 1956, Thomas Nichols for the fourth time won the championship of the English Boxing Association, and also qualified for the Olympic Games in Melbourne . In the semi-finals of the Olympics, Finn Hämäläinen defeated again, but in the finals he lost to the representative of the USSR Vladimir Safronov . Having received a silver Olympic medal, he soon decided to end his career as an athlete (the last time he fought in the ring in February 1957). Unlike most of his compatriots, Nichols did not go into professional boxing; instead, he continued to serve in the air force.
Links
- Thomas Nichols - Olympic Statistics at Sports-Reference.com
- 1955 European Boxing Championship Results