EXCLUSIVE – Even if she isn’t training, Dakota Ditcheva has an immediate source of inspiration when she is back in her home city of Manchester.
Ditcheva’s mother is Lisa Haworth, a pioneer of women’s sport in the UK who won the first World Kickboxing Association title ever contested in the country in 1987.
The multiple world karate and kickboxing champion during the 1980s and 1990s has a gifted heir to her influential legacy – and, helpfully, has run her own Thai boxing gym for more than 30 years, giving Ditcheva the chance to nurture what proved to be exceptional skills.
WATCH: PFL Europe 1 live on DAZN on March 25
“I was pushing my prams round as a kid while she was coaching,” says Ditcheva, who will face Malin Hermansson at PFL Europe 1 in Newcastle on Saturday. “I fought when I was like four years old, did a few clubs and then completely stopped and came back to it when I was 13.
“That’s when I started to take it seriously. She’s who I get it from and that’s why I say that it literally is in my blood.”
Coached by Haworth throughout her early fights, Ditcheva had won a string of world and European gold medals by the time she was 17. She drew comparisons with Ronda Rousey, was dubbed ‘The Beast of the Ring’ by one report and earned Sport England’s Young Sportsperson of the Year award in 2016, which was partly a recognition of the stage fright she overcame to reach the top of her sport against opponents who were frequently decades older than her.
But Muay Thai does not progress as quickly as MMA, Ditcheva felt, and her instant love for Jiu-Jitsu when she tried the discipline was one of the reasons behind her successful switch to MMA.
A move into the professional ranks in 2021 followed an unbeaten amateur career, and the second of her two first-round victories after joining the Professional Fighters League arrived with a thunderous punch at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
“Being able to knock someone out like that gave me the confidence that I’d been missing,” says Ditcheva of the eye-catching win to consign Thai fighter Katherine Corogenes to her first professional defeat.
“That was a massive thing for me. I’m one to put the forward pressure on. I’ll just go for whatever’s there, but I don’t really fixate on anything. I train for specific opponents but not in detail. It’s not like ‘I’m going to do this and they’re going to do this and this.’ People change for every fight so you never really know what to properly expect.”
Ditcheva is based at American Top Team in Florida, where her teammates include legendary fighters such as ex-Olympic champion Kayla Harrison and Joanna Jedrzejczyk, who successfully defended the UFC strawweight title five times.
There is an obvious perk of “getting up to the sun every morning” when she is there, as well as being able to “totally focus” by being in one gym. “Plus I live in a house with two brothers and my mum and dad,” she cheerily admits of the distractions of home.
“They’re eating all sorts and I’m trying to stay dedicated. I don’t care what anyone says, no-one has got enough dedication in them to not pick at different stuff in a houseful of five adults.”
Both brothers help hone Ditcheva’s stand-up when she is in the UK, and one is part of a corner for fights that includes Conan Silveira, the Top Team head coach known for his corner work with UFC icon Amanda Nunes.
Being part of a fighting family helped Ditcheva cope with the impact on her career of the pandemic. "My life revolves around training and fighting, so not being able to go out of my house was mentally a real, real tough place for me," she admits.
"I really struggled with that. I’m super-lucky that I have my mum and brother at home to be able to hit pads with and stuff, but that was a difficult time.”
Haworth, too, offers expert guidance from ringside. “When I came back to it at 13, my mum said, ‘I’ve done this sport before, I know how hard it is, I know what it’s going to take – do you want to do it?’” says Ditcheva.
“You don’t play with it, you do it properly and put everything into it. She’s seeing her daughter now doing the same thing that she’s done, and we are so similar. She was just as aggressive as I am — it’s all the same.
“She’ll always be one of my coaches and I feel like she’s made me the fighter I am today. People have added to it since I’ve moved to MMA, but she’s been the rock-solid roots of my fighting.
“My mum and I still have that mother-daughter relationship where we clash sometimes. We’re the best of friends — she’s my best friend — but we have a different relationship all the time. It’s a really nice story and it brings a lot of eyes to me as well.”
The potential financial rewards of succeeding in the PFL's first foray in Europe are huge, but there has been the occasional hitch for Ditcheva to reach this highly promising point: she describes a difficult weight cut after she went on a skiing holiday for a week as “a lesson you need early on rather than later”, but Haworth need not have worried about her warning from years ago being heeded.
“I’m not really a half-hearted person,” says Ditcheva. “I definitely knew I would go far. Whatever I set my mind to, I do it – because I know I’m going to get to the top."