Karol Itauma opens Chatham gym after heart attack ended boxing career

Karol Itauma is turning truGym in Chatham into Club Eight³, a specialist health club in Kent aimed at people seeking elite performance and longevity. The move gives the former gold medallist a new base in the same town where his professional boxing career was cut short by a heart attack in his early 20s.

The opening marks a sharp shift from competition to reinvention. Instead of leaving sport behind, Itauma has moved into coaching, training and building a business around the knowledge he carried from the ring. For fighters whose careers end suddenly because of medical problems, the hardest work often begins after the final bout: finding income, rebuilding identity and staying connected to the routines that once defined daily life.

Itauma’s next act also keeps him inside a boxing family that already has deep roots in the sport. He is the brother of heavyweight boxer Moses Itauma, who got into boxing at age nine after Karol invited him to his gym. That family link gives the Chatham opening a wider significance than a simple gym launch, tying the new club to a pathway that has already shaped another elite career.

His own return to the ring showed there was still unfinished business before this latest move. After 13 months out, Itauma came back to stop Michal Ludwiczak by TKO in Bournemouth on the Queensberry promotion, working under coach Shane McGuigan. That result underlined both his resilience and the reality that his competitive future had to be rebuilt around health rather than a long professional run.

The new club now shifts that effort into a permanent space. In boxing, the transition from athlete to coach is common because it preserves expertise, keeps fighters around the discipline and offers a way to turn hard-earned experience into work. Itauma’s opening also lands in the middle of a wider conversation about cardiac screening in combat sports and the strain forced retirement can place on mental health, especially when an athlete’s exit comes without warning.

For Chatham, Club Eight³ adds another sports venue with a clear purpose, and for Itauma it creates a second career built on the same foundations as the first. He is no longer trying to extend a boxing life that was interrupted; he is building one on new terms.