Keegan has high praise for Egan and his team of stars

GARY KEEGAN, the High Performance director, has been on the outside looking in for the past two weeks in Beijing but, last night, he was back where he belongs, among his boxers with their Olympic medals.

The astute Dubliner who has headed up the programme for the past five years, did not have the necessary accreditation to be with the boxers at the Olympic Games, but he was never far away and yesterday he was high up in Tier 3 to watch Kenneth Egan fight the light heavyweight final.

“I was interviewed before the fight and they were asking me what I thought Kenny’s chances were and I thought he had enough to beat the guy, but I said there were probably two factors – and they were Chinese back yard and Chinese crowd,” he said.

“The Chinese crowd were phenomenal today – very partisan as you would expect them to be, but the Chinaman boxing in his own backyard at the Olympic Games – it should never be a factor but it was today.

“But I am not going to complain because Kenny Egan did not complain and he is the man that counts. He went out there and he performed and he did his country proud. As you know we have always been focused on the performance because we can’t control the result unless we get our performance right. Kenny Egan over those last two weeks has got every performance right. He just did not get the result today, but the performance was certainly right.

“It was frustrating watching. At one point we were at 7-4 and the two boxers were maybe two feet apart and all of a sudden it goes eight and there was no punch exchanged. That has to be a little bit disappointing, but again the story of this championships should not be the scoring in this particular bout but the achievements of the boxers.”

On the eve of his departure to join the Irish Sports Council he reflected on the past five years.

“It’s been a phenomenal journey and to see the boxers perform the way they did over the last two weeks was just so satisfying for me and I am so proud of Billy Walsh and Zaur Antia and our full support science and medicine team — Gerry Hussey and Scott Murphy have done a fantastic job out here, but I should mention and I should not forget to mention, because I have done it some times but not often enough, Dominic O’Rourke, the president of the IABA, because he stood behind the programme. While some people in the sport may not have wanted it, he was the one who protected the programme and helped the programme to grow.

“From what I gather Kenny has been a big hit with the media here, they all love him. We don’t know what the Irish public think of him until we get home on Tuesday, but my guess is that they have fallen in love with Kenny Egan.

“He has been team captain for five years. He has never fallen out of favour. I have always felt that he was the man to be team captain irrespective of our ups and downs. He’s been fantastic. He has been some role model for Irish boxing but not only for Irish boxing – for Irish sport, I believe.”

He did not dwell on the judging in the final.

“Control the controllable has always been our mantra, because if you get busy focusing on excuses that you have no control over then you are going to sit in the doldrums all the time and you are never actually going to develop into a world-class team,” he said.

“As regards the judging we won’t complain about it. One thing we were not good at doing was celebrating — we were just so busy when we had our successes and we have had quite a few — we were rushing off to think about the next thing.

“I mean the qualifiers was a very, difficult time for us, it was very, very intensive, a lot of pressure involved and four of our boxers won gold medals in those tournaments and Paddy (Barnes) obviously finished in the top eight in the worlds, but we never really took the foot off the pedal to enjoy the moment so I want to celebrate the boxers here and forget about everything else.

“Obviously they will let a bit loose and they deserve to do that because it has been a long haul for them.”