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However, she is hoping for more than just her own qualification as currently women’s boxing is not featured at the Olympics.  BBC Leeds caught up with her and discussed her ambitions.

Nicola first started boxing at the age of 12 when she joined her local gym and took part in a boxing class for kids, thirteen years later and she is one of Britain’s finest female boxers.

She got her first taste of competitive action against a local girl from a rival gym, but had to wait four years for her next fight.  Despite the lengthy wait she remained keen and two years later she trained at an England selection camp alongside David Haye, the current WBA, WBC and WBO cruiserweight champion.  After impressing at the camp she was chosen as the first female to box for England in a dual international against a girl from Ireland.

Since making her international debut she has gone on to win the women’s national championship three times and her first gold medal at the Witch Cup International Tournament held in Hungary in 2004.  Her boxing career has gone from strength to strength and in 2007 she boxed in front of her hometown crowd in Leeds for the very first time.

Currently there are over 500 registered female boxers in the UK, 10 times as many as there were just three years ago.

Despite the increasing popularity of women’s boxing, Nicola admits she still receives a mixed reaction, “you get some people that are for it, then there’s some that are against it and then there’s some that are not too bothered”.

Although it doesn’t affect her performance, she still believes that the negative criticism is unfair, “if someone wants to do a sport, why not?  We should be backing the people that want to do all these other sports, we’ve just had a really good Olympics and that’s just because people are backing us more and that’s what we need really”.

Surprisingly, boxing is the only sport featured in the summer Olympics that does not allow women to compete, however, Nicola is hopeful for change and is confident that they will get the green light for London 2012, “if we can get it in the Olympic Games for 2012 it’d definitely be a good thing – it’s looking really good that it might be”.

Women’s boxing made its Olympic debut at the third modern Olympic Games in 1904, when women were invited to compete in a demonstration event at the Games in St. Louis, Missouri.  However, it did not receive clearance for the 1908 Games and for much of the twentieth century the sport was banned in many nations.

Britain’s National Women’s Boxing Development Manager, Rebecca Black, explains how the sport was revived in the second half of the century, “the actual recent impetus started back in the 1950s and a lot of that was around women who were models who wanted to train but not bulk their muscle”.

Although the sport proved popular amongst women it wasn’t until 1988 that the sport received international sanctioning, and it took a further eight years for women to receive clearance to box in Great Britain.

As women’s boxing is not included in the Olympic Games, the sport receives no government funding, instead women have to rely on sponsorship deals and employment, something which frustrates boxers like Nicola, “what a lot of people don’t realise is we put a lot of time in and we don’t get funded for it, whereas the men can train 24/7 and not have to worry about working and paying bills – so having that pressure and then having to win medals is quite hard”.

The International Olympic Committee are set to make an announcement later this year on whether women’s boxing is included in the next Olympic Games programme.

Meanwhile, the world’s top female boxers are currently training for the Women’s Boxing World Championships, which take place in November later this year in the Zhejiang Province of Ningbo, China.