Arriving in England last year to take his career up a notch, Rishi Gurung was immediately dropped into a boxing ring with heavy-hitting local welterweight Alfie Winter.

“Can you imagine? The first guy I had to face, he tried to kill me,” Gurung said. “He was trying to destroy my will.”

A Nepalese immigrant to Hong Kong when he was 10, Gurung was initially drawn to boxing because “you’re all by yourself … and I enjoyed people punching me, and punching them back”.

As the blows rained down from Winter, a sparring partner for Conor Benn and Chris Eubank Jnr, Gurung drew on his earliest experiences of the brutality of his chosen sport.

Already showing promise at 13, but unable to gain permission to fight at under-18 level, he boxed against a 23-year-old on an open card in Sham Shui Po.

“I broke my nose in the first round and was reeling for the rest of the fight,” Gurung said. “My towel was soaked with blood, when I took it home and my parents saw that side of boxing, they didn’t want me to do it any more. I stopped for a while.”