I want to be remembered as the best, says Taylor
Being Katie Taylor, she reveals such ambitions in a soft voice and with a shy smile, but those characteristics no longer mask the fact she is a warrior and fierce competitor.
The Olympic, world and European champion has just come off the type of weekend that is generally only seen as fun by the type of people you wouldn’t like your children hanging out with.
Three fights in consecutive nights — two in Cork and one in Dungarvan — have brought her record to 143 wins in 150 bouts and while sounding unconventional preparation for the impending European Championships, it actually replicates tournament conditions.
She already is the most decorated women’s amateur boxer at European level with five titles and is odds-on to make that six in Bucharest next month. Later in the year, the prices will be similarly prohibitive about her joining India’s Mary Kom as a five-time world champion.
Rio is a long way down the road but retaining her Olympic title is a prospect that makes the aforementioned smile widen appreciably. These are the reasons she has eschewed the professional game, in boxing and soccer, and has no hankering yet for what most of us consider the ordinary pleasures of living. Not that you can imagine Taylor relishing sleep-ins, duvet days, nights on the tiles.
Of course it is the nature of the competitor that he or she doesn’t see anything unusual in what they do. Which is why, initially, Taylor says she doesn’t know why she’s still pounding the roads and the punch bags, 17 years after she first laced a glove. The answer almost dawns on her.
“I just absolutely love amateur boxing,” grins Taylor. “I love my sport. I just love winning competitions. I want to make history in my sport. I want to go down as one of the greatest amateur boxers, I suppose.
“It’s all about the Olympics for me as well. I’d love to go [to Rio] and defend my Olympic title. It would be unbelievable to be able to do that and to bring home medals for my country.
“I want to be very dominant over the next couple of years. I don’t want to give anyone a glimmer of hope coming into Rio.
“Whenever my fights are very close, people come out of the ring and say ‘I nearly had you there’. You want to be dominant in every performance and I think it’s important for my own self-confidence as well to continue to win competitions and defend my titles. I want to go into the Rio Olympics as European and world champion.”
Striving for perfection is always a factor and the change in scoring system from points for punches landed to the professional style round-based scoring has freshened things up too. For a start, she is more powerful.
“I’m never really satisfied with my performances. There are always things... I feel I should have done, after the fights that I needed to improve on and that’s what I’ve done the last few years. I always try to add things to my game and I think I always go to every competition with something different and something new.
“I’ve been working on different angles as well. Since the scoring system has changed, the fights have become a lot more physical so I’ve become a lot stronger. I had to.”
The physicality doesn’t bother her and she reckons the change has made the fights more exciting. She likes to put on a show but winning is the key. Sparring has gone well and Taylor will travel with her male counterparts in the High Performance programme to Germany for a week before tapering off in the build-up to the Europeans.
She enjoys the build-up almost as much as the competition itself.
“The first six months after I came back from the Olympics was great but after that, I was just itching to get back into major competitions. I missed being involved in those big fights, big competitions but I think it was important to have that downtime as well, mentally more than physically. With the pressure I had to deal with coming up to the Olympics, it was important to get that rest. I’m really looking forward to getting back into it now.”
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