\n<\/p>\n
Sharon – who will be ringside in Riyadh alongside Noakes’ dad John – encouraged her sons to take up boxing. Noakes soon became a talented amateur at Westree Boxing Club in Maidstone and went on to win the ABAs in April 2019.<\/p>\n
A month later he was invited down to Billy Joe Saunders’ WBO super-middleweight title fight with Shefat Isufi in Stevenage and Francis Warren, the son of hall of fame promoter Frank, told him he wanted to manage his career.<\/p>\n
Noakes turned his back on the working life where he had jobs in a call centre, fast-food restaurant and as a roofer, to turn professional.<\/p>\n
“Thinking about those jobs is what keeps me working hard in the gym,” said Noakes. “I don’t want to go back to that.<\/p>\n
“The roofing was hard graft, but I was a fair-weather roofer. If it rained, you wouldn’t see me.<\/p>\n
“You can’t get out of the ring when it is tough – but you can get back in the van when you’re on a roof and it starts raining.”<\/p>\n
Noakes had three professional fights before the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and had to briefly go back to work – helping out his brother as a ‘strapper’s assistant’ on the railway as they cut the power to allow work to be done on the electrical lines.<\/p>\n
“It was a lot of time in the van,” Noakes said.<\/p>\n
He would munch away on snacks and – after one night with a few too many treats – he hatched a plan to run a marathon the next day to burn them off.<\/p>\n
“I was going to run 20 miles because I felt bad after eating a load of rubbish,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Then someone said: ‘Why don’t you do a marathon if you’re going to go that far?’<\/p>\n
“So myself and a friend went out and did the 26.2 miles. I did it in three hours 40 minutes.”<\/p>\n
His run through the lightweight ranks had been steady – and Noakes has carefully navigated his way to the top of the division.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Sharon – who will be ringside in Riyadh alongside Noakes’ dad John – encouraged her sons to take up boxing. Noakes soon became a talented amateur at Westree Boxing Club in Maidstone and went on to win the ABAs in April 2019. A month later he was invited down to Billy Joe Saunders’ WBO super-middleweight<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-boxing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}