Long before Moses Itauma learned to throw a punch, he learned what it felt like to be made to feel unwelcome in the only home he had ever known. The 20-year-old British heavyweight prospect — born in Slovakia to a Slovak mother and Nigerian father — has spoken candidly about a childhood shadowed by racial hostility, describing racism as a persistent burden that followed him from his earliest years.
Growing up as a mixed-race child in Slovakia, Itauma was no stranger to the sting of prejudice. In a recent interview, the unbeaten contender revealed that discrimination was not an occasional intrusion but a constant presence — a thorn embedded deep in the fabric of his formative years. It shaped not only how the world saw him, but how he came to see himself, and ultimately, what he chose to fight for.
His story is one shared, in different forms, by many children of mixed or immigrant heritage across Europe — the quiet alienation of belonging fully to neither world, navigating spaces where your appearance marks you as an outsider before you have spoken a word.
For Itauma, sport became both refuge and redemption. The boxing ring offered something the world outside it often did not: a space where only ability speaks, where character is measured in rounds, not in the colour of your skin.
Now ranked among the most exciting young heavyweights on the planet, Itauma carries his story into every fight — a reminder that the obstacles a man overcomes are as defining as the titles he chases.
His journey is far from over. But the telling of it matters, because behind the power and the promise is a young man who had to fight for his place long before the lights of any arena ever found him.
“Growing up in Kežmarok, Slovakia, wasn’t easy for my family — especially because of the colour of our skin. There was a lot of racism there at the time. My brothers and I faced racial abuse regularly, and it wasn’t a good place to be. My middle brother Samuel, who is much darker than me and Karol, suffered the most. He had bad asthma as a kid and had to go to a healing hospital school when he was just four. The other children refused to play with him simply because he was Black. One day, they locked him in a cupboard for a couple of hours. Every single day he’d come home crying. My mum couldn’t take it anymore — seeing her child in so much pain and rejection broke her heart.”
“My father, being Nigerian, experienced graphic racism whenever he visited. People would stop and stare at him on the main street, and the abuse was constant. My mum was also targeted for having a Black husband. The stares, the comments, the outright hostility… we couldn’t stand the looks and the abuse any longer. It wore us down as a family. My dad had lived in England before and decided enough was enough — it was time to move for a better life, somewhere with more diversity and opportunity.
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“We left Slovakia in stages. My older brothers went first with my mum to Chatham in Kent, while I stayed behind with my Slovakian grandmother until I was about eight. Leaving wasn’t just about escaping the negativity; it was about survival and giving us a chance to grow without that constant weight of being ‘different’ and unwanted. Those early experiences left scars — the daily crying, the isolation, the fear that came with simply existing in your own skin. It was painful, especially for a young child who just wanted to play and feel accepted”.
“At the same time, those hardships shaped me. When I was a teenager and briefly gave up boxing around 14 or 15, I remembered the sacrifices my parents made by uprooting our lives to come here. The UK felt like the ‘land of the must’ — a place where I had to make the most of the opportunity they fought for. It motivated me to push harder in the ring and in life”.
“Today, I still visit Slovakia twice a year and speak the language fluently. Things have changed a bit, and the culture has its warm, family-oriented side, but the racism we faced was real and serious. It taught me resilience. I’m proud of my mixed heritage — Slovak, Nigerian, and now British — even if being mixed-race sometimes means not feeling fully in one bracket. I’m not here to change anyone’s habits; I just focus on being myself and becoming the best boxer I can be. In the end, the pain pushed our family forward, and I’m grateful for the strength it built in us.”
Yet, Itauma does not carry these memories as wounds alone — he carries them as fuel. The boy who once cried in the shadows now steps into the spotlight of world heavyweight boxing, unbeaten, unhurried, and quietly formidable. Every opponent he faces meets not just a skilled fighter, but a young man who was told, in ways both cruel and unmistakable, that he did not belong — and who refused to believe it. That refusal is at the heart of who Moses Itauma is becoming. And it is worth far more than any record.