In the Shadows: Ramla Ali, Britain's First Female Muslim Boxing Champion, and the Gap Between the Red Carpet and the Ring

On the night of October 9, 2026, at the Vue West End cinema in central London, flashbulbs fired across the red carpet of the 70th BFI London Film Festival. Entertainment bulletins fixed their attention on Florence Pugh and Cole, the couple making their first public appearance together. But behind the poster of the film In the Shadows stands a name that anyone in sports should pause for: Ramla Ali, Britain's first female Muslim boxing champion.

Her life is the film's raw material. When an athlete becomes the model for a motion picture, the centre of gravity shifts away from winning and losing. It moves to who is telling the story, and who they are telling it to. That is why I chose to write about this premiere as a sporting event with a second layer of meaning, rather than as a short entertainment item.

Ramla Ali was born in Somalia, in a country consumed by civil war. Her family left their homeland when she was a child and settled in London. Boxing reached her later than it reaches most athletes, not through an elite sports academy, but through a small gym in the middle of the city. From there she rose by a path few choose: boxer, model, and public face of a community too often viewed through prejudice.

She became Britain's first female Muslim boxing champion. She stepped onto an Olympic ring. She wrote a memoir. And now she is the central figure of a film premiering at one of Europe's oldest film festivals. For a professional sports observer, this is a notable signal: a female athlete from an immigrant community has become a cultural icon with enough pull for the film industry to invest in retelling her life.

The 2026 BFI London Film Festival marks its 70th edition. The Vue West End, where the premiere was held, is one of the capital's long-standing cinema complexes. That night, the red carpet also featured Florence Pugh, known for projects such as Dune: Part Three and The Midnight Library, alongside Cole, whom she joined to support his latest film.

The 70th edition of a film festival is a milestone. Across its history, BFI London has introduced many sports works, but rarely has it placed a female athlete from a Muslim community at the centre. The selection of In the Shadows for this programme says something about the organisers' intent: sport, at its deepest level, is a story about people, not medals.

Boxing, like football, is a sport run by rules and by the people given the authority to judge. At ringside sit three officials: one referee and two judges. They do not punch or dodge, but their scorecards decide the fate of a bout. I always repeat one line: the law is never wrong; only the reading of the law is wrong. A clean, landed punch is scored differently from a glancing one. A round can be seen two ways, and both ways can be justified.

Ramla Ali has lived through such moments. Bouts where the result rested not on power, but on how people read each second. I once wrote that on a pitch there are 22 players and one person who is not allowed to make a mistake. In the ring, that number becomes two, but the principle does not change. The referee and the judges are the only ones not permitted to err, because their error cannot be corrected by a 90th-minute goal.

Across more than fifteen years of watching sport, from the stands in Busan to press rooms in Europe, I have learned that the decisive moment is rarely the hardest punch. It is the instant when someone must choose, in a split second, between two readings. Based on my experience watching matches, most controversies do not come from the rules being unclear, but from the people applying them reading those rules with emotion instead of the text.

What gives In the Shadows its weight is not its cinematography. It is that the film chose a figure British sport once treated with caution. A Muslim girl, wearing a headscarf, entering a sport long tied to masculine and violent imagery. She did not ask anyone's permission to be there. She simply punched, and won.

To understand why boxing is a sport of controversy, look at how it is scored. Modern scoring works round by round, based on landed punches, accuracy and control of the fight. Three judges sit at three different angles, and they can see three different outcomes. When the three cards do not agree, a bout is called a split-decision win. In those cases, no one is technically wrong, yet everyone feels something is off.

For a fighter like Ramla Ali, split-decision wins are the harshest lesson. You can control a fight for twelve rounds, then lose everything to one card. I have spent many nights rewatching footage, frame by frame, only to realise that the crowd's feeling and the judges' scorecards are two different worlds. That is why I never settle a fight on feeling alone.

Here lies the paradox of a film called In the Shadows, which means in darkness. Its premiere unfolded under the brightest lights. The storytelling industry takes a life that played out in silence, in empty gyms, in morning sessions before the city woke, and puts it on a red carpet. None of the people standing before the cameras that night ever had to take a punch to the face to be there.

And this is where I want to be blunt. The view from the substitutes' bench shows you how the system erodes the truth. A film about a champion usually tells the story of victory. But a fighter's truth does not lie in the wins. It lies in the losses no one filmed. It lies in the disputed scorecards no camera replayed slowly enough to analyse. The film can choose to tell the glory. But the glory was never the hardest part.

There is something entertainment media and sports media rarely say to each other. When an athlete becomes the subject of a film, they usually lose control of their own story. Ramla Ali became an icon, but icons are read in many ways. Some see a story about religion. Some see a story about immigration. Some see a story about women's rights. Very few see the simplest thing: a good boxer.

I once wrote that rules are written to protect the contest, but some people use them to protect themselves. That holds true inside and outside the ring. A sports film also runs on its own rules: it must sell tickets, it must carry emotion, it must have an ending. And sometimes, to get a beautiful ending, someone has to cut out the parts that are not beautiful. It is something both fans and filmmakers know, yet few say aloud.

For me, the greatest value of a sports film is not the victory scene. It is the scene where the character sits alone in the dressing room after a loss, unsure whether they will ever compete again. That is the part cinema usually cuts, and the part sports fans understand best. When faith collapsed in 2026, I learned to stand up without it. And I realised that sport's most memorable moments are rarely captured on camera.

Ramla Ali achieved what very few athletes do: she forced a sport to look straight at her. In the Shadows will be judged by box office and awards, but for the sports observer the true measure lies elsewhere. How many more Muslim girls will dare to walk into a boxing gym after this film? That is the measure worth watching, and it will not appear on any red carpet.

I may have missed a detail about the premiere, and if so, I will correct it. But one thing I am sure of: a champion does not need a film to become great. The film is simply the first time a wider audience sat still long enough to hear the story she had been telling with her fists for years.