Nicola Adams turns pro and leaves amateur boxing in a very different state from when she found it

The Leeds-born flyweight has won everything there was to win at her former level, and there is nothing stopping her from dominating as a professional

Nicola Adams will have her sights set on Jessica Chavez, the current number one female flyweight (Getty)

Nicola Adams will leave behind a transformed sport when she quits the old amateur game and fights for the first time as a professional in April.

Adams has the full closet of medals to be a contender for the greatest British amateur boxer and now, as her old sport changes, she moves to the much simpler world of professional boxing.

In 2003 at the first Female National Amateur Boxing Championships, held in Hendon, Adams won. It was a very different environment to one she has dominated during the last five years winning two Olympic golds, the Commonwealth Games title, one European and earlier this year the World Championship. No British male has ever landed the quartet.

In Hendon all those years ago at an event that glided way under the radar Adams was surrounded by women that had taken up boxing to get fit after giving birth and others that had switched from the Box Aerobics craze to contact. I wrote about Adams and also about Tamasin Mallia at bantamweight. Mallia lost for the fourth time and she was upset at ringside. “Now I have to do the horrible bit,” she told me after the fight. “I have to call my five-year-old, Tommy, and tell him that I’ve lost again.”

That’s the world Adams grew hard in and that is the innocent start that posed Adams such a task when British women finally started to compete at international events. The Chinese, the North Koreans and the Indians were all in front of our women up until about 2010.

Adams has been a full-time professional as an amateur for over six years, getting paid, getting sent all over the world and having most of her needs taken care of. The GB boxing system in Sheffield is the envy of all competent boxing nations and Adams was at its very core; she was eloquent, she was brutal and she never stopped smiling. Adams has made more girls turn to boxing than Anthony Joshua and the other recent male Olympic medal winners have managed with the boys.

A deal has been reached with Frank Warren, who has never been a fan of women’s boxing but has never been a major critic. Warren talked on Monday of eating “humble pie” after agreeing to sign her: “Nicola has changed the way I think about women’s boxing,” said Warren. In all fairness, women’s boxing has changed so much in the last 25 years. There is now guile, style and genuine depth; in the Nineties it was a poor, bloody and boring annexe to the men’s game. Katie Taylor, Adams and Claressa Shields changed the thinking by being thinking fighters; the pioneers were often brawlers.

Katie Taylor has made a faultless start to her professional career (Getty)

However, the men that govern the amateur game, which incidentally is not called amateur any longer, have just introduced three minute rounds for the woman. It could change the shape of the sport and will greatly benefit physically strong fighters and put at a disadvantage slick movers and boxers like Adams and Taylor, who turned pro last year after a poor Olympics. Adams won her titles boxing four rounds of two minutes and she will fight over two minutes again when she makes her pro debut on April 8. There will a homecoming in Leeds in May and not a dry eye in the place. Adams has not decided on a training team yet and could relocate to America to prepare for fights.

“I know that Nicola could win a world title in her first fight, but this is about developing and keeping the title when she wins it,” added Warren. In 2014 Vasyl Lomachenko, like Adams a double Olympic, European and World amateur champion, lost his second professional fight when he fought for a world title. “I needed a few more rounds,” he admitted. Lomachenko has won titles at two weights now and is untouchable; Adams, like Taylor, has the potential to the do the same.

Warren knows that before Adams can meet the number one female flyweight, Jessica Chavez, she needs a few more rounds. Chavez has been the full ten-round distance in 14 of her last 15 fights and that is the type of real experience, hard monotonous rounds that six or seven years at the top in the amateur game can never prepare a boxer for. Adams will start at flyweight and move through the weights.

Adams is a fabulous addition to the boxing landscape in Britain, a business that is thriving and alive with possibility and rumour. There are 500 more professional boxers with licences than at any point in the Seventies, real fights and freak fights are selling out in minutes and as many as five different British television companies will screen live boxing this year. Adams will be part of the BT and BoxNation package, which combined will show in excess of 70 nights of live boxing in 2017.

“It’s time for me to put the team in place and take on the challenge,” said Adams. In 2003, on a lazy afternoon in Hendon, today’s announcement would have seemed like fantasy.

Steve Bunce presents a weekly show on BoxNation, Sky Channel 437, on Friday.