Sport | Boxing Richard Riakporhe woke up in a hospital bed, aged 15, to be told he was lucky to be alive. Stabbed in the chest in a mobile phone robbery, the knife caught his artery and surgeons had to saw through his sternum to stem the internal bleeding. A few miles from the south London estate where the stabbing took place, life has come full circle, as the 34-year-old Riakporhe prepares to fight Chris Billam-Smith at Selhurst Park .
Riakporhe has crammed a remarkable amount into the intervening years: boxer, Burberry model, sometime dining companion of Naomi Campbell, close friend of Madonna and head of an eponymous foundation to combat knife crime. Pondering what his 15-year-old self would have said of his subsequent trajectory, he said: “I would have said, ‘What movie are you talking about?’ If someone had told me what’s happened, I would say, ‘What is this nonsense’.” Growing up on the Aylesbury Estate, where “everyone was committing crimes to get by”, he got in with the wrong people, although the stabbing was more a mischance of circumstance than any bad decision-making.
His good fortune to survive — against the doctor’s expectations — completely flipped his life. He subsequently kept his head down and stayed out of trouble. “I made everything about progression, will this decision help me progress in life?” he explained.
Having left it too late to make his mark in his first love of football, aged 18 he turned to boxing, also relatively late.