For Team USA boxer Jennifer Lozano, the people of Texas and Mexico are never far from her heart.
Jennifer Lozano, in Chile, for the Pan American Games in Oct. 2023 where she confirmed her ticket to join the Olympic team in Paris. Her journey to glory begins with her first Olympic bout on August 1st. It has been about 18 hours since she left Santiago, Chile, where she finished second at the 2023 Pan American Games. Now, traveling from Santiago, through Atlanta and then Houston, she has returned to Laredo, Texas, as the city's first homegrown Olympian.
After hugs and handshakes, smiles and pictures, thank-you's and quick interviews, several people give speeches, some mixing English and Spanish. Laredo mayor Victor D. Trevino proclaims today, October 29, 2023, as Jennifer"La Traviesa" Lozano Day. Her former principal says she has made everyone proud.
"We usually do 5 miles, sometimes 6, but today we're trying to take care of our feet," Michelle says. She and Lozano run together. And yet, because of their location, $320 billion worth of trade came through the two Laredos last year. There is so much trade that there is an agreement between Texas and Mexico to double the size of one of the international bridges from eight to sixteen lanes in the coming years. And, because the vast majority of those goods just pass through, there's a proposal to build another highway out of Laredo.
Her hunger's nothing new. To be a boxer is to make peace with discomfort. Sometimes it's a punch to the face. Other times it's running on sore feet. Right now, it's the most pressing of pains: a growling stomach. Lozano can't afford to weigh much more than her preferred fighting weight of 110 pounds.
He still remembers the first time she walked into his gym where, every day, about 60 children and adults train. He remembers how she wore baggy basketball shorts and a tank top with a T-shirt underneath that went down to her knees. She'd been training at another gym, going there since she was getting bullied as a kid for being overweight and -- since contradictions exist everywhere -- for only speaking Spanish. After a few months, she wanted to fight. The trainer there told her no.
"It's weird because things are coming true," Eddie says of their goals."Look," he tells me, lifting his forearm to show me the goosebumps. The sun has set. The temperature has dropped. The gym's adult class has ended and the last of the stragglers who stayed a few minutes to see an Olympian train -- the one whose photos, trophies, medals and name are all over the gym along with her golden ticket to Paris, framed and hanging from a door -- are also gone. The documentary crew following Lozano on her Olympic journey isn't there either.Lozano, and her coaches Michelle and Eddie Vela, have had Olympic aspirations for years.
"They're going to see why people fear me, why they call me the troublemaker," Lozano says of her opponents. Walsh says boxers started to focus on turning professional as fast as they could, bypassing the Olympics which brought with it valuable experience of facing the best boxers from each country. When USA boxing hired Walsh as head coach in 2015, the program was so low the gym had just one ring and six heavy bags; something a small local gym would have. As part of rebuilding the U.S. boxing program, Walsh rebuilt the gym where he now walks around until he stops in front of Lozano and watches.
"You could fight a Texan in a telephone booth," Walsh explains."But the ring is 24 feet by 24 feet. You got to be able to move and box." He thinks maybe they've broken her instinct to be a fighter. Perhaps, after nearly five years of working together, Walsh has finally convinced Lozano she's at her best as a boxer.During the many nights when she struggles to sleep, she will sometimes read or write in her journal. Other times she'll pace around her room or stare at the ceiling as she lays on the bed of her dorm room at the Olympic training center. She'll sometimes think about the things she has lost.
Now, when she can't sleep in her dorm in Colorado Springs -- almost a thousand miles away from home -- she thinks of how she got from there to here. How, not long ago, on sleepless nights she'd write,"I am a gold medalist, I am a gold medalist, I am a gold medalist," for however many journal pages it took to tame whatever self-doubt she felt. She thinks of how she's so close to what she has chased for a dozen years.
That day, Gonzalez came to the gym a few days later than the rest of the team because she was recovering from COVID-19. When she arrived straight from the airport, she had her eyelashes on and wore makeup. It didn't sit right with Lozano, feeling as though Gonzalez was more focused on looking good than boxing. Even though Gonzalez outweighs her by about 20 pounds and is several inches taller, Lozano asked her to spar. They fought.
"I was just so shocked with everything, because I never saw none of this back home," Lozano says."Everything I learn out here, one day I'm going to use to give back to my community."
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