Fighting with rats, traveling with smugglers and 14-month journey to Europe: unknown Francis Ngannou
MMA fans know Francis Ngannou as someone who is frighteningly strong, even for a UFC heavyweight champion.
What they probably do not know is that his path to glory was filled with hardships, hunger, poverty and everyday fight for survival.
At just 10 years old, he was shovelling sand into the back of a truck for hours and dreamt to be a truck driver.
'The biggest dream alive in that environment is to become a truck driver and better yet, a truck owner as they are on-top of the chain of command in a sand business,' Ngannou explained.
Poverty was rife throughout his town and the country of Cameroon. A lack of food at home meant a fight for survival and from an early age his fighting instincts were sharp. He would rummage through bins in search of salvageable food and would often find unwanted visitors joining him in digging through the rubbish.
'You would have to go to the market at night time to go find food in the trash,' Ngannou said on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. 'Sometimes you'd argue with a rat in the trash saying, "Get away from this tomato, it's mine, this rotten tomato is mine, not yours".'
People would laugh at him, he later said, for daring to dream of emulating his hero Mike Tyson as a boxer because there was nowhere 'within 100 miles to train', in his own words.
Francis moved to Douala, the largest city in the country, to study boxing, the artform and how to improve his craft. He shifted heavy bags of clothes in the garment manufacturing industry to give him some way of providing food, water and shelter.
But as years rolled by he had outgrown Cameroon and decided to move to France, which was easier said than done. It was a long road that took 14 months and six failed attempts.
Step one was crossing the open border to Nigeria, heading north to Yola. Step two was getting into Niger. After that professional smugglers helped take him through Niger to Algeria.
While crossing the Sahara desert, Ngannou drank from a well full of dead animals. 'It was so dirty,' he said. 'I may drink this water and die - but if I don't drink this water, I will die anyway. So I drank it.'
Algeria to Morocco was another trip and then, finally, Francis got to Spain. However, Spanish authorities detained him and put him in jail for two months before he was awarded refugee status. Eventually, he made it into France.
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