Nevin calm ahead of bid to trade up

Assured of a bronze medal, John Joe Nevin will try to cash it in for silver, at least, this afternoon (2pm) when he meets the world’s number one bantamweight, Lazaro Alvarez, in the Olympic semi-finals at the ExCel.

For a brief spell earlier this year the Mullingar man wanted nothing to do with London 2012. He won his second bronze medal at the world championships in Baku last November, added another senior title to his collection in February but then suffered a fractured jaw in the WSB which threw a spanner in the works.

“Not a lot of people know that about a month before we came here we had a very tough talking session to get him to be here,” Irish coach Billy Walsh revealed. “He wasn’t coming. He felt lots of pressures and he felt he wasn’t in the best of shape that he should have been in. We talked him through it and got him into the Indian training camp and, by the end of the camp, he started to get better, he saw progress.