‘It really tests you mentally’

Kaliningrad. Scezezin. Minsk. And now Almaty.

It’s a fact of life for a representative amateur boxer that the biggest of days usually dawn in ports of call with strange names and which lie far beyond the normal frame of reference for people on Europe’s western seaboard.

Russia. Poland. Belarus. Jason Quigley has had his passport stamped in all of them and each time he has returned through departures with a gold medal added to his inventory. European U23, European Youth. European senior champion.

The aim now is to make it four when he departs Kazakhstan.

Few people appreciate the efforts that will require. For two weeks now Quigley and the other eight members of the Irish squad have been domiciled in the Kazakh city adjusting to the surroundings and fine-tuning for the World Championships which begin in earnest today.

They sparred with the hosts the weekend before last. Cuba provided the pointers on Wednesday and again on Friday, continuing with Billy Walsh’s mantra that if you want to beat the best then you have to train with the best.

But the training, in many ways, is the easy bit. It’s the rest of the day that hurts.

“It really tests you mentally,” says Quigley, the Donegal man from the Finn Valley club who propelled himself to fame last June when he belied his unseeded status to defeat three of the world’s top four in claiming the middleweight title in the Belarussian capital.

“It can get boring at times. You would be sitting in your room and you have to watch your weight. You can’t even eat.

“Boxing isn’t only hard in terms of the training and getting into the ring and all that. It is about everything. You have to be made for this game.”

Quigley has adapted better than most. He will take to the ring next week on the back of a 28-bout unbeaten run, one which stretches back to the defeat to Darren O’Neill in the 2012 national finals and which cost him a place at the London Olympics. Little wonder that his father Conor rates mental strength as a key cog in his arsenal.

“I don’t know where I get it from,” he says after accepting his dad’s observation. “I suppose it is probably from my mother and father. From a very young age we were always scraping by, to be honest. We done what we had to do to get by.

“I was never pampered or never had nothing handed to me or anything like that. Everything I got I fought for. It’s the typical story of a boxer: no high life or nothing like that. Now is the time for me to get up there now and hopefully I can make a comfortable life for my family.”

He openly admits to a love for the professional game but not before Rio. Boxes still need to be ticked in the amateur game before that and claiming a first ever world gold for his country would be one of some note given the popular perception that these championships are even tougher than the Olympics.

He has reason to be confident. The European title he claimed four months ago was, inarguably, the most impressive performance by any Irish sportsperson in 2013 to date given he had to overcome the reigning world champion as well as the man seeded first globally to go all the way.

All these months later and it clearly still hasn’t sunk in. A disbelieving laugh escapes involuntarily when he is asked to put his achievement in context, as if the man whose gloves were first raised in victory as a 10-year when he overcame a future national champion in Noel McBride still hasn’t processed it.

“If I seen a fellow team member winning the European seniors I would be thinking, ‘Jeez, that is some achievement’ but when you win it yourself you don’t think it’s such a big thing. It’s weird. Maybe it’s just the way I look at things. I would probably think more of it if it was someone else.

“It’s only when people say it to me, that I beat the world champion and three lads in the top four in the world, that I think, ‘Yeah, so I did’. You take it on board that you have beaten the best in the world and that gives me that confidence that I have proven to myself how far I can go.”

Kaliningrad. Scezezin. Minsk. Almaty.

Right now, the whole world is his oyster.