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So, as a retired fighter, its OK for me to tell you some secrets about when I used to fight. I have fought everywhere between 57kg and 75kg over a 13 year career(all as an adult). I have to admit that when I fought very light for my frame that is was more about how I looked than how I felt (or performed).. I trained to lose weight and look very slim rather than train new techniques and get better. My walk round has always been between 75 and 85 kg but I would not dare fight at that weight (which I was very strong and comfortable at) for fear of carrying a bit of fat. I learned this behaviour when training in Thailand early in my career, and also it was about ego and body image - fear of what others think. Does anyone else have the same issues or was it just me?

I think that when I trained in Thailand between 91 and 93 there were very little consessions for farangs. By 97 as more trained in camps in the "tourist areas" it started to change and become more of a business transaction(one way) where farangs paid and chose how much training they did... So many have never actually experienced old school training that forges diamonds.

This is one of the most interesting things for us who laud the excellence of the Golden Age of Muay Thai, and the ages that surround it. The very truth of the matter seems to be: Fighting excellence has come out of great cruelty, intense difficulty, and even injustice. We think somewhat glamorously about things like how Dieselnoi's patron was a mafia boss and godfather, in the Hollywood sense, but this is, in a lived reality, a realm of harshness and crime. The romance we have towards traditional hierarchies include also injustices, and dictatorships in life. Muay Thai (as with so many fighting sports in the world) likely laundered not only slews of monies (gained from cruelty & suffering), but also social statuses. This is the nature of it all. It might be said that it was an immense oppression machine, a compression machine, that produced not only the excellence of these fighters, but also the fights and promotions that produced them. Talking this over with Sylvie, this seemingly inherent connection between cruelty and fighting excellence, historically, makes me value all the more the precious achievements in Self that people like Dieselnoi, and fighters of his age produced. These men fashioned high art, of themselves, in the harshness of opportunity and circumstance. From where we stand now, it seems like the worse thing of all to forget these men, to forget or lose what they created, out of that harshness. It was that medallion of gold that they mined from their flesh, forged into an art and history. When we remember them, when we document them, we extend its reason for being. Dieselnoi once was talking about the differences between his historical fate and that of Samart, in the context of having beaten him in the fight of the year, The Holy Grail of Fights. He says, he would not have wished upon anyone his fate. He explained that in Thailand it's not how you go along, its how things end. Just like in a 5 round fight, it's the 4th round that matters. For someone like Dieselnoi its the ending that matters, for all of us who are seeking to record and celebrate the creations of these men, the excellence they drew out of extremely harsh circumstances, its about fashioning that ending for them, the one that says: It matters. We can do that now.