‘She seems everyone’s sister, daughter, friend’

Katie Taylor’s performance resonated around the world, with many prestigious international titles rushing to acclaim her.

Barry Bearak, writing for the New York Times and Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, chronicled the life and times of our gold medallist from her humble beginnings in the Ballywaltrim estate.

“For the Irish, Katie Taylor is more than a great athlete sprung from the native soil; people speak of her as if she has sprung from themselves, for she seems everyone’s sister, their daughter, their friend,” she wrote.

Meanwhile, there was no repetition of the anti-Irish sentiment in the Sydney Morning Herald’s spuriously titled article “Punch Drunk: Ireland intoxicated as Taylor swings towards boxing gold” earlier this week.

“Irish gold medallist Katie Taylor has become the global face of women’s boxing, electrified a nation and been told she is good enough to beat the men,” wrote its sports correspondent Phil Lutton yesterday, who said she was a “steely vision of grace under fire”, and women’s boxing’s answer to Floyd Maywea-ther Jr: “the best pound-for-pound female fighter on the planet”.

Having repented for describing Katie as British, Gareth Davies, writing for The Telegraph, said: “Taylor is just getting started. She will ... become the greatest woman boxer of all time.”

The Guardian described her as “the best boxer there has ever been in the women’s game”. The paper also derided opponent Ochigava’s complaints over biased judging in Taylor’s previous bouts as “sour grapes”, and proclaimed that such protestations “surely made victory all the sweeter”.

Rick Morrissey in the Chicago Sun-Times encapsulated the emotion of this seminal moment in Irish sporting history.

“In the 30 years I’ve been a sportswriter, I have never heard a louder crowd over a sustained period... I believe an entire country followed her lead. Back in Ireland, the world ceased to rotate for the amount of time it takes for a four-round Olympic fight to be completed,” he wrote.

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