Guest Post
Lists and rankings are good for a sport, and female Muay Thai on the world spectrum dramatically lacks any kind of cohesive vision of even who the best fighters in the world are (a bit on world titles, and other measures below). If you can’t even picture who is really, really good, and think about who might be better than whom, a large part of ambition and dreaming is lost on fighters, and on youth entering the sport aiming at excellence. The purpose of this list is really to just start somewhere. It’s my personal list. I try to be fair, but I do have a bias toward Thai-style scoring, because to me that is what Muay Thai actually is. This means that there is a fair amount of extrapolation that has to be done because less and less are the top female Muay Thai fighters even able to fight in their sport in full 5-round professional rules fights. I have to make guesses from rule sets and promotions that are not what I’m measuring here (I leave MMA performance out because it is just too much of a stretch). If you can’t see the embed, you can see (and comment) the list here: Best Female Muay Thai Fighters in the World
I do follow female Muay Thai pretty closely, but it is possible that I’ve missed some important details, among the other fighters considered for the top 10: Thanonchanok Kaewsamrit, Amy Pirnie, Ashley Nicholas, Nong Biew, Yolanda Schmidt, Buakaw Sutai, Maesa Tor. Buamat, Faa Chiangrai.
A Little About Other Measures
Sadly, the major sanctioning Muay Thai bodies do not accurately, or even refreshedly keep rankings of female fighters in their weight classes – the WPMF once tried, but hasn’t updated their website rankings in perhaps 2 years or more (as of writing this their ranking website pages don’t even work), the WMC and WBC have no published rankings – which means that World Titles are pretty much obsolete for determining comparable achievement in the sport. World Titles perhaps were always or often political for female Muay Thai, to some degree, but in the last 5 years things have really degraded into almost complete meaninglessness. If there are no rankings, there is no actual champion. In Thailand it is pretty common to just make up a title fight between two decent fighters, but this is really not much different than a “good fight” at any stadium. On the other hand IFMA Championships are interesting tests, but the rule set there is much geared toward International Kickboxing standards, and has confused most Thais fighting in it. Additionally, this just is not professional Muay Thai, any more than maybe Olympic boxing may be professional boxing.
A note on Thai female fighters included in the list. I think it’s important that any list of the best female Muay Thai fighters in the world include or at least take into consideration Thai female fighters. They are the most skilled fighters in the world, often training and fighting from a very early age. The biggest problem is that when these fighters reach their mid teens they start fighting less frequently (waiting for bigger paydays or sidebets) and the talent pool they fight in gets smaller and smaller. So small in fact that their considerable skills may cease growing, or even diminish. Also, because these top fighters often have been training and fighting since young they can just stop training regularly when older. Male Thais their age will usually have a steady stream increasingly difficult opponents upon which they can sharpen themselves, so male teens will find themselves in camps more or less always training. Top female fighters, in the same gym ethic, will simply not train for long periods of time because they have no fights. When assessing the Best Female Fighters in the world, the inclusion of the Thais always has this caveat. My suspicion is that if Thai female fighters had the consistent training and regular fights of their older, western counterparts they would regularly outclass them. But, these dulling off-periods have to also be included in the assessment of current skill.
If you’d like to see some fight video of some of these fighters and others you can check out this Top Female Fights thread in the Roundtable forum.