Britain's top female boxer Jane Couch has collected her MBE from the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace later.
The 39-year-old from Fleetwood in Lancashire was awarded the honour after a 14-year professional career in which she won five world titles.
Known as The Fleetwood Assassin, she credits boxing with keeping her out of "big-time trouble".
The boxer, who is currently based in Bristol, said getting the MBE was like "getting a right hook from Mike Tyson".
After being expelled from her Blackpool school as a teenager she lived "a life of booze, drugs and street fighting".
However, when she was 26 she saw a TV documentary about women's boxing in the US and decided to take it up.
The sports star burst on the world boxing scene in 1996, winning a welterweight title after a 10-round fight that showed her as a world-class fighter.
Couch, who is now based near Bristol, has only been allowed to fight in the UK since March 1998 when she won a sexual discrimination claim against the British Boxing Board of Control.
The board was forced to grant her a licence to fight and she went on to win the first professional women's boxing bout in Britain in November that year.
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