Hannah Rapp, an American professional boxer who challenged for a world featherweight title last month, has died at 26 after being struck by a car while riding her bicycle in Brazos County, Texas, on Saturday.
She was taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead, ESPN reported. According to that account, a car passed her, stopped, reversed and struck her.
Charles Medina, 31, has been arrested and charged with manslaughter, and is being held at the Brazos County Detention Center. He has not entered a plea, and the charge is an allegation that has not been tested in court.
A short professional career
Rapp, from Yorktown, Indiana, had built a record of 8-0-1 before her most recent fight.
That fight came in June, against Tiara Brown for the WBC women's featherweight championship at the Caribe Royale Resort in Orlando. Rapp lost by unanimous decision.
Getting to a world title fight undefeated, in a career that short, is not a routine progression. The featherweight limit in women's boxing is 126 pounds, and the WBC is one of the sport's four principal sanctioning bodies. A fighter who reaches that stage at 26 with nine professional fights behind her is generally understood to have arrived early rather than late.
Her opponent's tribute
Brown, who beat her in that title fight, remembered a moment before it.
"When she asked for my autograph, it filled my heart because we were getting ready for war, yet she was still asking for my autograph," Brown said. "It made me smile, we fought a GREAT fight for the fans from the 1st bell to the last! It was my honor to share the ring with her."
The detail is worth sitting with. A fighter days from contesting a world title asked her opponent to sign something, and the opponent found it disarming rather than odd. It suggests someone who had not stopped being a fan of the sport she had reached the top of.
What is not yet known
Authorities have not published a full account of the collision, and no motive or explanation has been made public. Court proceedings will establish what happened; reporting now cannot.
Cyclists killed by drivers are a routine occurrence in most countries and rarely produce national coverage. This one did because of who she was, which is its own comment on how such deaths are usually recorded.
