National Elites mark beginning of the end for boxing's exile from the ring

Carol Coughlan, Tullow-born but boxing out of Monkstown Boxing Club, will touch gloves with Crumlin’s Courtney Daly to mark the return of the sport in Ireland

Carol Coughlan, Tullow-born but boxing out of Monkstown Boxing Club, will touch gloves with Crumlin’s Courtney Daly to mark the return of the sport in Ireland

At 7pm Friday evening, the bell will ring inside the National Stadium on Dublin’s South Circular Road for the first time in over 18 months and Carol Coughlan, Tullow-born but boxing out of Monkstown Boxing Club, will touch gloves with Crumlin’s Courtney Daly.

TG4 is broadcasting every second of this year’s National Elite Championships, either on TV or via its YouTube channel. If most eyes will be on the finals then the opening women’s light-flyweight preliminary bout is the one that will signal a massive step forward for sport in Ireland.

Indoor sport, to be precise.

Covid has been tough on the entire sector but indoor sports have been treated to far more licks from the school bully even as its reign of terror waned, the very roofs over their heads counting against them and ensuring that they would have to endure their torment for that much longer.

The only indoor sporting event, certainly of any significance, to be held in Ireland since the shutters came down in mid-March of last year was basketball’s FIBA European Championship for Small Countries.

That was last month when five national squads and their staffs isolated in their hotels and in Tallaght’s National Stadium across the course of a week or so. That Ireland won it wasn’t the only success. The entire event produced just one positive Covid test.

The hope is that boxing will pick up that baton over the course of the next three weekends. As was the case in Tallaght, there will be no spectators, the numbers present stripped down to those deemed essential to run things and ensure everyone’s health and safety.

The boxers will be accompanied by two ‘cornermen’ but only after passing an antigen test, a doctor’s examination and satisfying the scales.

Every entrance into the venue will be manned and the fighters’ lack of masks will set them apart as much as their skills.

Paddy Gallagher, the national secretary of the Irish Athletic Boxing Association (IABA), estimates that there will be no more than 15-20 souls in the old but cherished venue at a time for what he acknowledges is a “guinea pig” event.

“It will probably be a flag bearer for other indoor sports. If it goes well they’ll be asking us for the template, I’d say. It took us weeks and weeks to plan this and we sent everything though to the Sport Expert Group to be ratified.”

September is usually the start of the boxing season with athletes eyeing the approaching county leagues, or maybe the National Novices and Intermediates, but all that and everything else is on hold until the Elites can prove it can be done efficiently and safely.

That the showcase championships are first up is not ideal given different fighters have had to navigate contrasting roads to get here. The few Tokyo Olympians on show, and others in the high-performance circle, have been able to go about their business far easier for far longer than those forced to bide their time and wait for their gym doors to reopen.

The anecdotal evidence is that some clubs have opted against entering boxers on the basis that they needed twice as much time to train properly. Gallagher admits that numbers are down from ‘normal’ years but plenty have mended and made do.

“We were prepared anyway,” says coach JP Kinsella whose Monkstown club is being represented by Coughlan and three other fighters while another, Sean Mari, is off at the World Military Games in Russia.

“When the outdoor training was allowed in pods of 15 or whatever we were doing that.

“We knew these guys were going to the Elites so it’s not like the Ricky Hatton thing where you took six months off and came back to the gym. We had six training for the Elite … and that meant that we didn’t have to go anywhere for sparring. They were able to spar among themselves in two groups basically.”

If the timing still doesn’t suit everyone then the IABA’s room to manoeuvre was constrained by the fact that the international global body was pushing for a list of confirmed entries for the upcoming World Championships in Belgrade by Monday coming.

Thankfully, a plea for an extension was granted. That now allows Bernard Dunne, the IABA’s high-performance director, to run the rule over those involved before deciding on his team. Titles will be highly prized but the final say when it comes to places for the trip to Serbia come October lies with the former world champion.

Only two of the seven boxers who represented Ireland at the Tokyo Olympics will actually be on view in Dublin.

There is no Kellie Harrington, Aidan and Michaela Walsh had entered but then withdrew, while Aoife O’Rourke was granted a walkover.

Kurt Walker and Brendan Irvine are the only two of those last seen in the Ryogoku Kokugikan due to be in action.

The National Stadium will be nothing like the flurry of activity that was the venue when it last played host to an event and crowned 56 new national third-level champions on the second weekend of March last year.

The tuck shop will be shut, the lobby empty and the road outside devoid of the usual traffic but there will be boxing — actual competitive boxing — taking place on Irish soil for the first time in a very long and a very dark time.