Opinion | How burgeoning MMA superstar Angela Lee handles success by staying in the moment

There is a reassuring normalcy about Angela Lee.

Fresh and buoyant, athletic and photogenic, she walks through your world in a pleasant and unthreatening manner. Sporting the standard millennial fitness uniform, workout tights with a loose fitting training top, she could easily pass for a modern day yoga or Pilates junkie. But then she snaps on a pair of open finger grappling gloves and everything changes.

Attacking a heavy bag with vicious kicks and rapier blows, she quickly becomes Angela “Unstoppable” Lee, One Championship women’s atomweight world champion and, according to group founder and chairman Chatri Sityodtong, not only the youngest MMA champion ever but “one of the world’s highest paid female-athletes in the entire sport of MMA for any organisation.”

Throw in her 50,000-plus Instagram followers as well as her multi-ethnic background – born in Vancouver to South Korean and Singaporean parents, raised in Hawaii, now fighting out of Singapore – and this 20-year-old phenom is any marketer’s dream, particularly with a career record of 6 and 0.

It’s a fact not lost on Sityodtong. “Not only is she the best women’s world champion on the planet right now,” he says, “but she exemplifies everything One Championship stands for. She is humble, kind, courageous and inspirational.”