Nicola Adams takes Gold for team GB

When Nicola Adams first put on boxing gloves at her local gym as a tiny schoolgirl of 12, bouts between two women were banned by the British Boxing Board of Control. They were too unstable, went the reasoning, on account of their menstrual cycles, and besides no one wanted to see a pretty girl get hit.  On Thursday, 17 years later but not a great deal taller, Adams finally gave her response in the ring, emphatically defeating the Chinese world champion flyweight Ren Cancan to become the first woman ever to claim an Olympic gold medal in boxing.  She had only gone to the gym that day because her mother had an aerobics class and could not find any childcare.  Britain may be getting accustomed to gorging on medals, but the country's 24th gold, courtesy of Adams, is more significant than most.  When the IOC ruled in 2009 that women's boxing would be in the London Games, 11 years after the BBBC was obliged to lift its unequal ban, the former world champion Amir Khan said he was against the move, saying: "When you get hit it can be very painful."  On Thursday he was ringside, paying lavish tributes, with everyone else, to the skill and dexterity of the female fighters.

Once London's festival of sport has come to its conclusion, there is little question women's boxing will be reckoned one of its great successes. It is not merely the ferociously supportive crowds the sport has drawn – even if the most vocal bellows have been reserved for Ireland's Katie Taylor, who took lightweight gold shortly after Adams's bout – but the respect the competitors have commanded, among boxing ingenues and experienced sports devotees alike.  As recently as March this year, the International Amateur Boxing Association (AIBA) was threatening to force women boxers at the Games to compete while wearing skirts "to help distinguish them from the men".  Immediately before Adams's bout, Ching-Kuo Wu, the AIBA president, said the Rio Games would almost certainly see the number of divisions at which women could compete at the Games double from three to six. London's women fighters, he said, were "heroes in boxing history".  As Adams stood on the podium to claim her gold, four days into women's Olympic boxing history, the exclusion before now of women from the sport already seemed as ridiculous as the bar, until 1984, on their running the marathon. Did she think she had answered the sceptics, she was asked later?