Champs face fight to reach Olympics

IRELAND’S two newly crowned European champions, Ray Moylette and Joe Ward, are still not guaranteed a shot at Olympic qualification.

They will have to go through a mouth watering Open Senior tournament at the National Stadium on August 10-12 to gain selection for the World Championships in Baku in September which is the first of the Olympic qualification tournaments.

And those who fail to qualify in Azerbaijan will have to go through next year’s national championships to make the team for the only remaining European qualifying tournament, which takes place next March.

It means that Moylette, a former world junior champion, who made an early exit from this year’s national championships, must go back in against the likes of reigning champion Ross Hickey and the runner-up Karl Brabazon. Ward, meanwhile, must renew rivalry with Olympic silver medallist Kenneth Egan and Davy Joyce, who is the 2009 world junior champion.

“That’s how it is with Irish boxing at the moment,” director of boxingDominic O’Rourke pointed out.

“Last week’s achievements in Ankara were simply fantastic and it just goes to show the array of talent we havewithin the association at the moment.

“Ray Moylette was phenomenal. Every contest was a close contest but he won them all convincingly — his explosive attacks were devastating. He is a rare talent.

“Joe Ward was slow starting but he grew in stature with every contest and then, in the quarter-final, semi-final and final, he was absolutely fantastic.

“The man he beat in the semi-finals, Imre Szello of Hungary, defeated Kenny Egan in the EU championships in Denmark. When he got into thetournament he improved with every contest.”

Michael Conlon was another boxer O’Rourke singled out for hefty paise.

“He gave one of the best displays by an Irish boxer in a long time to beat the English boy, Khalid Yafi, who won a silver medal last year, but he was unlucky with the draw because he also got the Italian Vincenzo Pidardi, who was a medallist both in the European championships and the Olympic Games and still he was very unlucky not to get into the medal round.

“John Joe Nevin was robbed — beaten by one point — after giving hisopponent a boxing lesson in the last round.”

But O’Rourke, who flew directly from Ankara to Keszthely, Hungary, for the European Youth Championships, insisted that none of those are guaranteed a place on the team for the World Championships.

“The Open Senior competition will determine the team to go to the World Championships. We have such quality (but) we have to go back to another tournament to select the team for Baku. Kenneth Egan, Eric Donovan, David Joyce, David Oliver Joyce, John Joe Joyce, Ross Hickey, they are all major medallists.”