Nicola Adams can still pack quite the punch, even during conversation.
The retired boxer, one of Britain’s greatest Olympians, is chatting away about her home life, and how it feels to be combining motherhood with dating again, when she casually announces: ‘I’m a gold star lesbian.’
Given that Adams, 43, has two Olympic golds, it’s tempting to assume she is making some kind of sporting comparison, staking a claim on a medal for the bedroom. She quickly sets me straight.
‘A gold star lesbian is someone who has never been with a man, which I haven’t. Would never even cross my mind. I just don’t find men sexually attractive.’
While we are having lessons about LGBT terminology, maybe she can clear this one up: Christine McGuinness – ex wife of the TV presenter Paddy McGuinness, and a relative newcomer to the world of relationships with other women – recently described herself as a ‘five-star lesbian’.
Nicola laughs. She knows Christine, in fact the two were recently romantically linked.
They were spotted together at the Diva Awards in April, sparking much speculation, helped on by the fact that Christine made some comments about how she liked muscular, sporty, quite masculine-looking women. Box ticked there, then.
Christine, it turns out, is also Nicola’s ‘type’.
Nicola Adams describes herself as a ‘gold star’ lesbian – a lesbian who has never been with a man
Nicola split from model Ella Baig in 2024 after the pair were together for seven years
‘I do like blondes,’ she admits. Alas, that’s where the confirmation of any relationship ends.
‘People got all excited about it, but we really are just friends. I’d seen her around because we just happened to be represented by the same agency, but we’d never actually spoken properly.’
Still, can she explain what Christine meant? Because it’s had a lot of us wondering.
‘I think Christine just made that one up,’ she says.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at her candour: Adams has a string of honours recognising her services to sport. She received an MBE in 2013 and an OBE in 2017, to go in her trophy cupboard full of boxing medals.
Yet she’s also consistently been applauded as one of the most influential voices in the LGBT world, a role model to many.
She wears her sexuality with ease; and always has. It was never an issue either in her personal life or her sport. She is direct, no nonsense about who she is and what she wants, sometimes bracingly so.
Even in this new chapter – Nicola is forging an acting career (she’s about to make her debut in a Hollywood movie, as a cage fighter), having come out of a high-profile relationship with the mother of her child – her ease at discussing it is striking.
Christine McGuinness, who separated from Paddy in 2024, recently described herself as a ‘five-star’ lesbian, and Adams confesses the model is very much her type
Adams and Ella have one child together, via IVF. Nicola’s egg was fertilised by sperm from a donor who looked like Ella
She split with model Ella Baig in 2024, after a turbulent time.
Their seven-year relationship had been the stuff of glossy Hello! magazine spreads, not least when they had their son Taylor in July 2022 after a difficult IVF journey.
Nicola’s egg was fertilised by sperm from a donor who looked like Ella, and Ella carried the baby. When I ask her about the split I expect an answer along the lines of how complicated these things can be, given the pressures of parenthood, travelling, fame and all the things that can prove problematic for couples in the public eye.
Not in this case, though. They split up because Ella – who had always posted ‘adult’ pictures of herself on the social media platform OnlyFans – began to post more and more explicit material, and Nicola couldn’t cope.
‘She’s always been on OnlyFans, but it was becoming more and more extreme, more and more explicit, and it’s not something I felt comfortable with.’
She says there were some difficult conversations.
‘I mean, that’s her job. I can’t stop someone doing what they enjoy, and I wouldn’t try to. All I can do is voice my opinion and see how it’s taken and I did that. And we couldn’t agree, so we parted ways.’
It wasn’t a sudden decision, of course. There was a prolonged period of counselling: ‘I’ve had it myself, and find it helpful, so we did try that.
Nicola stepped out of the boxing ring and on to the dance floor in the 18th season of Strictly Come Dancing in 2020
During her career as a boxer, Adams won two Olympic gold medals at London 2012 and Rio 2016
‘I wanted it [the relationship] to work out for my son. I wanted him to have a family unit, but ultimately it didn’t work.’
She says she’s never been a judgmental sort of person.
‘My view [of OnlyFans] is that if that’s what you enjoy doing, do that. I’ve never been the type who thinks that just because I don’t like it, I don’t think anybody else should be doing it.
‘It’s just that for me, it’s not something that I want a person that I’m with to do.’
She says she’s not a prude, but she is traditional when it comes to relationships.
‘I’m definitely monogamous. I’m not into polyamory or anything like that. I’m a one-woman person. I don’t like to share.’ Did she feel that, via OnlyFans, she was sharing Ella with the whole world? ‘It was just that the explicit side was increasing, and I wasn’t comfortable with that.’
By the time the relationship ended, she was more than ready to walk away. But there was no sense of failure. ‘Because I’d literally tried everything. It was a case of “There’s nothing else you can do”.
‘I think when a relationship ends there is a lot of sadness about the fact that the person you thought you were with isn’t the real person.
‘In the beginning, breaking up was hard, but once I’d figured that out, it became easier.’
Her relief is evident two years on. She’s not presenting, I say, as a woman who has been to hell and back.
‘I’ve already been through that part. Now, I’m at the fun bit. I’m loving finding out who I am again. I feel free. I’ve been on a couple of dates, had a couple of situationships. It’s been fun. I’m enjoying myself. If a serious relationship comes along then, yeah, I’m all there for it. I don’t want to put pressure on myself to find the perfect person.’
It must be complicated dating again with a child in the mix.
She won’t get into detail about how the new shared parenting arrangement works, but Taylor is clearly her life.
Is he anything like her? ‘Yes. He’s got a strong will. He is always trying to win.’
She’s started doing a little boxing with him ‘on the pads’, but adds: ‘I think he’ll be a swimmer, although he thinks it’s funny to throw my phone in the pool and tell me to get it.’
Motherhood was the big revelation of her life. Terrifying, yes (Taylor was premature, which added to the worry), but ‘the most wonderful thing’. She says she never wanted to carry a child – ‘it just never appealed’ – but she always wanted to be a mum.
Her own childhood had been famously turbulent, growing up on a tough council estate in Leeds.
She’s talked previously about once suggesting to her mother that they kill her violent father (although her dad has always denied that he was abusive).
She has also spoken of being forced to steal when hungry, and of almost being taken into care.
In fact, her whole boxing career began because she felt safer in the boxing ring than she did at home. Now, she credits her years of therapy with giving her the tools to be a better parent – and to stop history repeating itself.
‘Therapy helped me be a better parent to Taylor. I don’t want to repeat the mistakes my parents made. He won’t be damaged by the sort of traumas I went through, the violence and the emotional abuse. I had to grow up very fast. I want Taylor to be able to stay a child.’
Indeed, her own childhood traumas have become even more unfathomable to her now that she’s a mum.
‘When you see how vulnerable a child is, it blows your mind that anyone can hurt them. Taylor is such a bundle of joy. He always has a smile. He’s so happy. Seeing the world through his eyes when he picks up a flower or sees a butterfly is so sweet.’ She’s not in contact with either of her parents now, or her younger brother.
‘I don’t speak to them. It was all too toxic. It’s not an environment I want my son to be involved in.’
Nicola is astonishingly open, but her face – permanently smiley, out of the ring – is sometimes not the most expressive.
She hadn’t realised her facial expressions could be quite rigid – deceptively so – until she started to work with an acting coach as she attempted to change careers following her retirement from boxing in 2019, at the age of 37.
She’d acted a little before her sporting career took off – she was an extra in Coronation Street – so it was natural to return to it in retirement.
Her acting coach had to work a lot, though, on her poker face.
‘We were doing some work that involves me expressing pain, sadness, whatever, and my acting coach said “you don’t look like you are in pain or sad”. It was because I’d had to have a poker face for boxing for so long. You can’t show any emotion, or anything really, on your face. I hadn’t realised that. I spent a good ten to 12 months working on it.’
She also credits acting with forcing her to confront some of her own issues. ‘It’s all about emotions and expressing them. I kind of feel that my acting has almost forced me to deal with some of my childhood stuff.’ In the past few years her acting career has definitely taken off, with roles in Waterloo Road, the BBC drama set in a secondary school, and High Hoops, a comedy about a teenage basketball team, but she’s now had a big breakthrough. Later this year, we will see her in her first movie role – starring opposite Gemma Arterton and Ewen Bremner.
The film Killa Bee is based on the true story of Bryony ‘Killa Bee’ Tyrell, a nurse by day and a MMA (mixed martial arts) fighter by night. Nicola plays her formidable cage fighter opponent Isa Janssen.
As improbable as her new career sounds, she would not be the first sports star to go from the ring to the film set. After all, ex-wrestler Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s 2025 film The Smashing Machine earnt him critical acclaim, just shy of an Academy Award nomination.
‘Acting’s my main job now, so it’s just so exciting that my dream is coming true,’ Nicola says.
She jokes about it being difficult to just follow the script if her character is knocked to the floor, when her natural tendency is to want to win.
And she hopes it will lead to wider Hollywood opportunities – and not necessarily ones that require some form of fighting on her CV. ‘I’d love to have roles that are nothing to do with sport,’ she admits. Her dream role? She’s previously hinted that she’d like to be the first female Bond but says today that, even better, would be a Marvel villain.
‘People are used to seeing a happy smiley Nicola Adams. I’d love to challenge that.’
Will she add to the gold in her trophy cabinet one day in the form of an Oscar? You wouldn’t put it past her.
