I won The Apprentice and £250,000… now I’m using Lord Sugar’s help to become boxing’s female Eddie Hearn
THE APPRENTICE winner Marnie Swindells is looking to become the female answer to Eddie Hearn with the help of Lord Alan Sugar.
Swindells won the iconic BBC entrepreneurial programme last year and scooped the £250,000 cash prize.
And she put Lord Sugar’s investment to good use by launching her own gym, Bronx Boxing Club in Camberwell, South London.
Swindells first got the keys to her gym in 2019 but legal reasons prevented her from officially opening up till four years later.
During that period, she raised £400,000 of her own money but needed an extra push – and that is when she looked Lord Sugar’s way.
Swindells, 28, told SunSport: “As this was all happening I thought, ‘What have I got to lose?’
“So I put myself forward to go on the show, try and raise more money, expand the gym and thought, ‘Why not go for it?
“That’s when I applied for the show with the hope of making – what I’d already created – bigger and better.”
Swindells began boxing herself as an amateur at 17 and had eight bouts, twice winning the national Haringey Box Cup.
But a lack of opportunities for women at the time KO’d her hopes of turning pro – and by then she had already found a passion for boxing outside the ring.
She said: “I love boxing and everything it stands for but boxing is an all or nothing sport.
“As they say, ‘You can’t play boxing.’ And I don’t think as a fighter I loved it enough. This, now I’m here in this position I think this is what I was born to do.
“To facilitate, to make these spaces, I’ve found the bit that I was supposed to do in boxing.”
Swindells graduated in history and politics at Goldsmiths University before qualifying as a barrister.
But even after long days in court, she would always find herself back at the boxing gym until she got the idea to launch her own.
And after going all the way in the 2023 series of The Apprentice, she invested the money into her Bronx Boxing Club.
She has renovated the downstairs and upstairs, which was previously a vacated and “mice infested” nursery.
But away from just owning the gym, Swindells has her eye on managing and promoting fighters.
She revealed: “Even though women’s boxing has been on a massive trajectory itself the actual business side of boxing still remains quite untouched from a women’s touch.
“There isn’t like a female promoter that you can name, a top female manager, a female Eddie Hearn or a female Ben Shalom.
“So I would love to step into those shoes one day. I would love to take up the mantle.”
Swindells has not yet revealed her plan to become boxing’s First Lady to Lord Sugar – but she thinks he will be on board.
She said: “Well, I’ve talked about it a lot so he’s probably caught wind that it’s the direction I’d like to go into one day.
“But I think it goes hand in hand with the growth of Bronx as a brand and the gym.
“The more gyms we have, the more fighters we have, the more opportunities.
“And ultimately that is the priority; the top priority is to get more sites, to get more people into boxing.
“Promoting is something as I said, I think will come when the time is right.
“When that time does come, I will have a conversation with him and by that point I think he’ll go, ‘Do you know what? She’s been true to her word so far and I’ll back that.’
“You never know, he might invest some more and we might launch our own promotion company.”