"La Locomotora" Oliveras: the story of the champion who overcame violence and is now fighting her most personal battle.

Alejandra "Locomotora" Oliveras, the former multi-world champion boxer whose life is a testament to resilience and overcoming obstacles, is going through a delicate period of her health. The woman, who overcame a childhood of extreme poverty and gender violence , was urgently admitted to the José María Cullen Hospital in Santa Fe this Monday after suffering a decompensation with symptoms consistent with a cerebrovascular accident ( CVA ) . Her condition is delicate and she remains under observation with a reserved prognosis, while her loved ones and the country closely monitor her progress.

Oliveras, 50, was initially treated at a hospital in Santo Tomé and then transferred to Cullen Hospital, where a CT scan and MRI confirmed a left-sided ischemic stroke. Hospital director Bruno Moroni reported on confusional syndrome associated with a loss of mobility throughout the left side of her body . Her condition is critical, and although it did not worsen in the crucial first 48 hours, she required surgery this Wednesday following clinical deterioration and new changes detected in a CT scan. With paralysis on the left side of her body, drowsiness, disorientation, and difficulty speaking, Oliveras faces her toughest fight yet, although doctors warn that it is "premature to talk about after-effects" and that "we are still in the critical observation stage."

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Oliveras's story is a tale of overcoming hardship that began long before she stepped into a professional ring. At 16, as a "little girl" weighing barely 50 kilos, she experienced a hell of domestic violence. "At 14, I fell in love and became a mother at 15. I wanted to get together with that person because I wanted to have a family, and that's when the hell began. He hit me for the slightest thing," she recalled. The breaking point came when her partner hit their son. "That's when I said, 'Enough, I don't want this life. I'd rather be dead than continue like this.' And I decided to give it back to him."

It was then that, secretly in the small room where they lived, she began doing push-ups. "One day he came to hit me, and I punched him. That punch was born from pain, from helplessness, from the soul, not from my hand. Because I was a child. I was born with that strength that we all have in our hearts, which we use in extreme situations." That same night, Oliveras and her son moved into her parents' house in Alejandro, a town of 5,000 inhabitants in Córdoba.

Her entry into professional boxing was unexpected. Alejandra had dropped out of school after her pregnancy and was doing odd jobs to make ends meet. She got a job at the town radio station reading the news. "One day I read that Mike Tyson had been released from prison. And I was a Tyson fan. So I said on air, as if joking: 'Oh, how I'd love to be a boxer. I'm up for it, I'd fight, I'd get into the ring.'" A former boxer visiting town heard her and organized a local boxing festival a month later. The referee was the butcher, the competitors were farmworkers. The only women were Oliveras and "La Yarará," a neighbor.

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"I was so scared! But when the bell rang, my heart exploded," Oliveras says of her first fight. That night, she didn't feel like she was fighting her opponent, but rather overcoming the poverty, discrimination, and violence she had endured. She won, and that victory fueled her: "I said, 'I want to be a boxer.'"

Despite sexist criticism that told her to "do the dishes," she clung to the discipline of boxing. "It's a sport and it's a job too," she emphasizes, highlighting the rigorous diet, study, training, and rest required.

Alejandra "Locomotora" Oliveras was crowned WBC super bantamweight world champion on May 20, 2006, in Mexico. She earned $2,800, but upon returning to Argentina, she was robbed. "They stole the money I'd earned throughout my life... but not the pride of being a world champion," she asserts with resilience.

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Just days before that fight, she suffered another devastating blow: she found her husband cheating on her with her own sister. Far from collapsing, she channeled the pain into more training. "You can always transform bad things that happen to you. Instead of affecting me, it strengthened me. I went out to fight for the world title and won it," she says.

Oliveras became a high-performance athlete, training more than nine hours a day and sacrificing much, such as family celebrations, to give her children the education and opportunities she didn't have. "I first saw a pair of sneakers when I was 16," she recalls.

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Her great mentor was Amílcar Brusa , Carlos Monzón's legendary trainer. Although Brusa didn't initially believe in women's boxing, upon seeing her fight, he told her: "Baby, I'm going to make you a world champion." His words were a cornerstone: "The gym will never betray you. If you train, no one can beat you," a lesson Oliveras has literally ingrained in her skin.

Although boxing didn't make her a millionaire, fame and hard work allowed Oliveras to build a future. She opened gyms, one of them free in Santa Fe, where 500 children train, and gives motivational talks across the country. Her latest decision, her foray into politics, stems from the same conviction that drove her to boxing. She admires Patricia Bullrich for her "courage" and fight against drug trafficking, and joined her group seeking to "change lives" through sports, which she considers "the enemy of addiction and violence."

As a constituent assembly member in Santa Fe, his political agenda was interrupted by his current health emergency. For Oliveras, education is fundamental: at his gym, the only requirement for children is that they present their school report.

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Alejandra "Locomotora" Oliveras, a woman who transformed suffering into courage, demonstrates that her fight for dignity and a better future continues, both in and out of the ring, and now, in her own struggle for health.