Elin Cederroos

Elin Cederroos, a Swedish orthodox super-middleweight, built a short, sharp professional boxing career that rose quickly to world level and ended just as briskly. Born on 16 January 1985 and based in Västerås, she boxed tall for the division at around 5ft 10½in with a 70in reach, using that length in a measured, straight-line style rather than wasting it on theatrics.

She came to the pro ring late by boxing standards, having first been a professional footballer in Sweden, and she turned professional in April 2017 after her second pregnancy. Her debut, on 8 April 2017, was an emphatic one: a stoppage win over Sanja Ostojić, setting the tone for a fighter who preferred clarity to clutter.

The speed of her rise was the striking part. After only a handful of bouts, she was already boxing for major hardware, and on 22 March 2019, she met Belgium’s Femke Hermans for the vacant IBF female super-middleweight title. Cederroos won by majority decision over ten rounds, the kind of result that tells you the contest was hard enough to leave room for argument, but clear enough to put a belt around one's waist.

Less than a year later, she added a second world title. On 10 January 2020, she outpointed Alicia Napoleon-Espinosa to lift the WBA female super-middleweight championship and become a unified champion. It was a disciplined victory built on control and work-rate, and it left her sitting with two of the four major belts in a division that was tightening into a proper world picture.

That picture led her, inevitably, to the biggest night of her career. On 30 April 2022 at Madison Square Garden in New York, on the same bill as Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano, Cederroos challenged Franchón Crews-Dezurn for the undisputed championship at super-middleweight. It was a high-stakes unification, all the major titles in play, and it did not go her way: she lost a unanimous decision, with wide scorecards that reflected Crews-Dezurn’s control across the ten rounds.

After that defeat, she carried on, but the route back to the summit is rarely a straight road, particularly in the smaller weight-class ecosystems where opportunities are precious, and timing is everything. Her last fight came on 4 February 2023 against Shadasia Green. Cederroos was stopped in the sixth round, having been dropped earlier and then taking sustained punishment before the referee intervened. It was her first stoppage loss, and it proved to be the closing chapter of her pro story.

Cederroos retired later in 2023, leaving the sport as a former unified world champion with a professional record of 8 wins and 2 losses, including 4 knockouts. Her entire pro run covered roughly six years from debut to final bout, and most of the meaningful business was done in the middle—IBF champion in 2019, WBA champion in 2020, then one attempt at the undisputed crown in 2022.

In the ring, she was not a fighter who needed noise around her. At her best, she boxed with structure: a straight jab, a willingness to keep the contest at her range, and the patience to let rounds come to her without chasing them. The results show a woman who learned quickly, climbed fast, and spent her peak years in real title fights against the division’s leading names—Hermans, Napoleon-Espinosa, Crews-Dezurn, and Green, before stepping away while still close enough to the world level to make the decision look deliberate rather than forced.