“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” (Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859)

It is from this celebrated formulation—and, more importantly, from the principle at its conceptual core—that we begin to observe Joseph Lasiri’s Muay Thai-oriented existence. Adaptation, understood both as the ability to respond to altered circumstances and as the faculty of transforming without dispersing one’s identity, runs through his trajectory as something structural: instilling an almost biological sense of continuity, reflected within and beyond the Weitee.

For years, adaptation first assumed the tangible form of sacrifice: waking early, training before a shift at the pizzeria or car wash, returning to training in the afternoon, then working again at night. And beginning all over again. Day after day. A ritual process through which to alter the contours of his existence just enough to keep alive the dream of becoming a professional fighter and, one day, raising a championship belt above his head.

For the Italian-Moroccan fighter, however, adaptation has always implied transformation too. At first, through the body: still very young, his encounter with Muay Thai allowed him to recognise possibilities he had never imagined for himself. Then, as fights accumulated, that metamorphosis ceased to be solely muscular and entered the mind. It took shape through time spent in Thailand, through a profound immersion in the ‘Art of Eight Limbs,’ through a rediscovery of his own cultural roots and, above all, through the processing of the entire constellation of emotions that fighting inevitably draws to the surface: inner states, vulnerabilities that, once recognised and accepted, cease to constitute a limit and become material for knowledge… and for further strength.

It was also through this progressive reconciliation with his own emotional dimension that Lasiri ultimately became ONE Strawweight Muay Thai World Champion.

There is, finally, one last adaptation. The most subtle. One that belongs to the realm of re-elaboration and awareness, and emerges only after a multitude of fights: the recognition that, beyond the fighter, many other Joseph Lasiris are possible. One who loves to run, immerse himself in nature, smile, write and, above all, love. Without disavowing his first great love, nor diminishing its significance, but finding for it a place within the greater expanse of an existence.

Your sporting story begins within your family and with football, where you were initially written off as being too small. Later, people even questioned whether you had the physical build required to succeed in Muay Thai. With that in mind, can you take us back to the origins of a world champion whom, for many, could never have become one?

“I was born into a family of four boys, so in a sense I grew up within a competitive environment from the very beginning, constantly measuring myself against my brothers. We had always played football. My father followed the sport closely. Then, one day, I was rejected by a team. I took it very badly. I always say that I came to combat sports almost by accident. A friend of one of my brothers was at our house one day and started talking about this discipline called Muay Thai. He was roughly my age. I had no idea what it was, but something about the way he spoke of it made me want to try. It was my first experience of fighting: I was seventeen. I walked into the gym and immediately felt captivated by that world. I began to sweat, to struggle, to understand what hard work actually meant. Until then, I had experienced football primarily as a game. In the gym, however, I felt something different: a form of redemption. I felt the need to keep going because I could see myself becoming stronger. I could feel my body beginning to develop. At that age, my ego was very strong and, in a sense, it worked in favour of that initial infatuation with the sport, drawing me ever deeper into the discipline. I needed somewhere to release what I was carrying inside, somewhere to test myself.

I had always been very thin. Of the four brothers, I was physically the smallest. Whenever something happened—as often does within the dynamics of a neighbourhood—my father would send my older brother to defend me. Inside that gym, by contrast, I began to feel free, more confident. I felt that I no longer needed anybody else. That was where everything began. Muay Thai forged my character, and I believe it gave me a set of tools that were very different from those my brothers developed. I love them deeply, but I recognise that, in my case, combat sport instilled a different kind of discipline from the one they—and many other people—experienced. After all, the first truly important commitments and appointments of my life came through this sport.”

You have said that, when you first entered a Muay Thai gym, you almost immediately began to believe in yourself more because every day you could perceive some form of improvement. Before the belts and the results, how did the discipline begin to alter the way you saw yourself?

“At that age, many of my peers found satisfaction through school: receiving praise for a good grade, doing well in an exam. I never had a particularly good relationship with studying. The first genuine compliments I received in my life came through combat sport. Those were my first authentic experiences of satisfaction. From that moment onwards, I wanted to accumulate that feeling, that sense of gratification. And, as I said, at the time ego still played a considerable role. Very quickly, I began to distinguish myself: first within the class, then among the competitive fighters, later in Italy and eventually internationally, until I reached the highest levels of the sport. In truth, these are things I was only able to understand fully towards the end of my career. At the beginning, everything was simply about moving forward: working, refusing to give up, continuing almost unconsciously. When a greater degree of awareness eventually arrived—particularly during my final fights—I felt that I became much stronger inside the ring as well. At the same time, I began to understand something far more profound about my own life.”

Before becoming a professional, you worked an extraordinary number of jobs: as a pizza maker, a car washer, a shop assistant. You moved to London to support your family financially while continuing to train throughout. Looking back, do you think the fighter’s mentality you eventually developed was forged inside the gym, or also during all those hours spent far away from the ring?

“I believe very strongly in fate, in destiny. When I look back at certain moments in my life, I realise how many times I could have stopped. How many times I could have said, ‘All right, I have a proper employment contract now. I no longer have to wash cars or make pizzas. I work in a shop, I wear a shirt, I earn a good salary. Why should I sacrifice all of this for a sport that may never give me anything in return?’ I was fighting at the time, of course, but earning very little. Certainly not enough to survive. So every time somebody told me that continuing to fight made no sense, or asked me to choose, I found myself standing at another crossroads. And every time, I chose Muay Thai. I always chose fighting. I knew several fighters who sacrificed sport in favour of work, and I could never blame them for doing so. I, however, always wanted to continue making space and time for the sport, even after defeats. Until, at a certain point, sport became a profession in every sense of the word. It became my actual job. I no longer needed to do anything else, and at that moment I developed a different kind of confidence: everything depended on me. Even now, I continue to believe that it was destiny.”

You have often used the concept of adaptation when speaking about your life. Fighting, after all, also means adapting continuously: to another body, to an unexpected change of rhythm, to something the original plan could never have anticipated. Is it possible that the difficulties you experienced before becoming a professional taught you how to fight even before Muay Thai itself did? And, if so, in what way?

“Adaptation is part of who I am. My first real experience of adaptation was the fact that, at seven in the morning, I was a fighter; by ten, I was washing cars; and in the afternoon, I became a fighter again. Looking back now, those identities almost seem incompatible. I do not know whether I would be capable of doing that today. But at twenty, I was able to move from one character into another. In the morning, I could be completely focused on a goal—perhaps I had to travel to Birmingham or Austria to fight. Then, almost abruptly, the following morning I was a car washer again, or making pizzas, or working in a shop. And then, just as suddenly, I would become a fighter once more. All of that helped me enormously when I began fighting around the world. In Thailand, for instance, the rhythms were different, the temperature was different, I had to remain there for long periods of time and train under conditions I did not know. I had to adapt. I believe those forms of adaptation, which I had already learned when I was younger, remained with me. They allowed me to confront genuinely difficult situations and, above all, helped me to grow. More than sport in a general sense, it was precisely this discipline, the one I feel I constructed through combat sport, that shaped me.”

You grew up in Italy in a Moroccan family and have always carried both identities into the ring. At the same time, becoming the fighter you ultimately became required you to immerse yourself deeply in Thai culture. What did Thailand teach you culturally that you could never have learned merely through the technique of Muay Thai?

“The period I spent in Thailand was decisive in my life. Growing up in Italy, I had a tendency, more or less unconsciously, to distance myself from my Moroccan origins. There were relatively few Moroccans around me at the time and, in some way, I ended up pushing that part of my identity away. In Thailand, by contrast, I began to recognise aspects of myself in the people I encountered. People supported one another; you learned to be content with less; you worked hard. It was there that I began rediscovering my own origins, partly through meeting communities of Thai Muslims. I would see very young boys who were already extraordinarily disciplined, and I recognised something in them that seemed to lead me back towards my own roots. I gradually began, entirely on my own, to take a greater interest in where I came from and to move closer to that part of myself. Paradoxically, I felt more Moroccan in Thailand.

That is another reason I speak so often about destiny. It was there that I began to understand the value of my Muslim faith. I started to appreciate it more deeply, to stop concealing it and to feel proud of it. And that helped me in my sport as well. When you genuinely believe in something, that faith can sustain you enormously in a fight. Because when you enter the ring, there is no one standing beside you. You are alone. So you have to believe. One of the greatest things Muay Thai gave me was precisely this: learning to be proud of being Moroccan.”

Muay Thai is often described as ‘The art of eight limbs’, an expression that evokes a body capable of transforming every part of itself into an instrument of combat. When you are inside the ring, do you experience your body primarily as a highly trained machine, or is there also a creative, artistic dimension to the way you understand fighting?

“In Muay Thai, unlike boxing or kickboxing, you are not working exclusively with your hands or your legs. There is grappling, there is the clinch—a form of standing combat—then knees, elbows, punches and kicks. The beauty of Muay Thai lies precisely in this combination. Perhaps you are not particularly good with kicks, but you are exceptional in the clinch. Perhaps your boxing is not especially effective, but your knees are incredibly strong. When all these elements begin to combine, different styles emerge. And that is precisely where I think the idea of art enters the conversation. Anyone who truly commits themselves to this discipline will, sooner or later, discover their own art. That is something I only began to understand with time, and I find it beautiful.

Even if you cannot throw a kick in the same way as another fighter, and at first that makes you feel inferior, you begin to believe in your own art, to refine what belongs specifically to you. When two people with different characters, different experiences and completely different ways of fighting encounter one another, that, for me, is where the art truly begins. And sometimes the fighter who is technically superior loses because they possess less heart than the other person. Or a more experienced athlete is defeated by someone with less experience who brings more heart, more intensity, more art into the fight.”

Before one of your fights, an opponent said that you were too emotional. After defeating him, you responded that emotion was precisely your strength. How do you learn to use and govern emotion to your advantage within a combat sport?

“By recognising it. Angelo Valente, who has always been my coach, taught me an enormous amount. One of the most important lessons concerned fear. When you feel fear, it can almost feel like a physical weight. That happened to me often and, even with experience, there were many occasions when I still struggled to manage it. Angelo once told me something I will never forget: do not try to control it. On the contrary, let it come. Welcome it. I learned to allow fear to arrive, to let it pass through me, and only afterwards to look for a solution.

Very often, instead, we try to hide fear. We pretend it does not exist. But when you step into the ring and that fear suddenly appears in front of you, you are in trouble. If, by contrast, you begin carrying it with you during training, when you stand opposite somebody in sparring, you almost learn to become friends with it. You learn to acknowledge its presence rather than conceal it. It is easy to fight with your eyes closed. It is far more difficult to know that somebody is standing in front of you and that you have to face them. That approach became particularly important during the final fights of my career and, in a sense, I dedicate those fights to Angelo as well. It is something that has remained in my heart, something that will always stay with me and that I will try to pass on to my own students.”

Talking about emotion, you have spoken about imagining the moment you would become world champion many times before it finally happened. What does it feel like when something you have visualised for years actually becomes real? And, perhaps more importantly, what happens the day after you have achieved the dream around which you have constructed so much of your life?

“When a fight camp begins, you start living with a constant tension. Progressively, everything begins to revolve around what will happen on the day of the fight. Especially after an exhausting day of training, you go home and, before falling asleep, that is what you think about. You see yourself lifting the belt. You tell yourself that you can do it, that you can win. You even begin imagining the details: I will do this. I will not do that. And eventually, every thought leads back to that belt. But it does not happen only once. It happens every day. Every night you go to sleep thinking about it. Every morning you wake up thinking about it.

Then, eventually, the day of the fight arrives, and everything becomes real. At that point, you have to try to remain calm, almost to stop thinking about it altogether. And when, finally, you actually find yourself holding that belt, there are so many emotions. Everything comes out. You remember every moment you sacrificed, every occasion when you said no because you were focused on your goal, every time you asked yourself whether all of it was truly worth it. Those experiences genuinely enrich you. And, personally, they will continue to enrich me for the rest of my life.”

Throughout your career, you won fights and lost others; you captured belts and relinquished them, moving between extraordinary peaks of euphoria and moments of profound disappointment. How do you learn to confront emotions that are so radically opposed? How do you stand up again after losing a belt? And how do you realign mind and body after experiencing disappointment inside the ring?

“I have lost fights. Many of them. And over the years, I realised that the emotions I experienced after defeat changed profoundly. At the beginning, you would lose a fight and feel as though all the work you had done had been meaningless, even though rationally you knew that was not true. I would go home and remain silent. Then I would return to training and work even harder than before. I remember that very clearly. When that trauma arrived—because sometimes defeat can genuinely be experienced as a form of trauma—everything suddenly ended. And it ended in a way you had never wanted it to. It hurts. But if all you do is continue thinking about what happened, then you are finished. I reacted by throwing myself back into training and work. It was an unconscious response, but even that lack of awareness can still make you stronger.

As you grow, that unconsciousness gradually transforms into awareness. Perhaps the things you do do not change radically, but the way in which you do them. As my career progressed, defeat gradually began to matter less to me. By the end of my journey, that had happened too. Until eventually another moment arrives: you lose and begin asking yourself, Is this still worth it? Do I genuinely want to continue doing this? And at that point, an entirely different conversation begins.”

Your last official fight took place at the end of 2023. For an athlete who, for years, organised time around training sessions, weight cuts, opponents and fights, what happens when combat suddenly ceases to structure life in the same way? Today, do you still feel that you are first and foremost a fighter, or are you discovering parts of Joseph that had little space to exist during those years? And, if so, what are they?

“This sport absorbed every part of me for years. That constant doing, every single day, eventually becomes almost like an addiction within your life. And if you suddenly remove all of that, you inevitably have to fill the space with something else. I felt that absence too. I had decided that I no longer wanted to enter the ring because I was searching for a more peaceful life, but I had never truly imagined what that life would actually mean for me.

I began asking myself where I would find that same adrenaline. I still wanted to experience fear. There was a part of me that continued to want things to be difficult. Then, slowly, I began discovering something different. I began learning acceptance. The anger you once wanted to fight, you begin to accept. The fear you once resisted, you begin to welcome so that you can understand it and confront it properly. I also began discovering a more romantic side of myself. It’s funny but it’s true. Today, very often, I simply need to smile. To love more. To love myself more deeply, to love another person more fully, to search for art elsewhere. I found myself attending a poetry show, for example, and I loved it. I even began writing myself, and I still do. Then there are walks in nature, running on trails, that particular kind of physical effort in which I can still recover a certain degree of adrenaline. And once I am completely exhausted, I can finally begin to appreciate the landscape around me.

I cannot deny that there has also been a great deal of suffering during this phase. Every evolution inevitably carries a certain amount of suffering with it. But I am grateful for all of it. Without the path I followed, I would never have arrived at these feelings which, for me now, are far more important than any belt. When you begin to understand that sometimes you simply need to move in order to feel well; when you realise that doing something different does not need to make you feel ashamed, but can simply give you pleasure; when you try a new sport and discover something you did not know before, then you genuinely begin to open yourself to life.”

When speaking about fighting culture, it is impossible not to consider Champion and the ability a brand can have, over time, to shape the visual and cultural imagination of an entire movement. What does representing Champion mean to you today?

“I am very proud of it, particularly because Champion continues to support many professional athletes who are still fully active in competition. Being part of that circle allows me, in some way, to remain close to the world that defined such an important part of my life. Even though I no longer fight in the way I once did, being involved with a brand such as Champion, wearing its clothes and continuing to be recognised within that world has a profound value for me. I was genuinely pleased to be here and to teach the class. It is a way of feeling that what I built over the years still carries meaning, and that the journey I made inside the ring can continue to find different forms through which to express itself.”

After all these years spent fighting, what message would you like to pass on, particularly to the Italian Muay Thai community? And what kind of legacy are you now trying to build?

“What I am trying to build is inevitably connected to what I have lived through. For me, teaching Muay Thai to my students does not necessarily mean turning them into fighters or leading them towards a belt. If they achieve those things, I will naturally be proud of them, and those experiences will probably serve them in many of the same ways they served me. But today I understand that the deepest richness of sport lies somewhere else. Its true richness begins when you stop understanding sport exclusively through results and begin living it as a way of life. That discipline can assume different meanings at different stages of your life, evolving alongside you. If you are able to build a lasting relationship with sport, that is where its authentic value begins to emerge. 

Competition, sooner or later, ends. Inevitably, a moment arrives when you no longer fight, when you are no longer chasing a belt, when there is no longer an opponent standing in front of you. But if, even then, you still feel the need to move, to train, to take care of yourself through sport, then you have truly understood its value. If I will be able to leave that, for me, that would already be an important legacy.”