'I have a target on my back and they're getting more dirty as well'

Olympic gold medal winner Kellie Harrington at the announcement of Permanent TSB as the title sponsor for both the Irish Olympic and Irish Paralympic teams at the Paris 2024 Games 

Kellie Harrington always insisted that the Olympics wouldn’t change her. She said as much time and again through the rounds of the lightweight division at the historic Ryōgoku Kokugikan sumo hall in the Tokyo district of Yokoami last year. And she doubled down on it after climbing the podium.

What she couldn’t prevent, what she could have never foreseen, was how her gold medal would change everyone else. Of all the surreal moments since her return from Japan, digesting the fanboy and fangirl reactions of people who knew her long before she was KELLIE HARRINGTON has been right up there.

“I’m bumping into a lot of people now who do know me and they’re like, “oh my god, Kellie Harrington, I can’t believe it’. And I can’t believe that they can’t believe it is me. I’m like, okay, hold on, this is weird. It’s just mad. I can’t comprehend that, people asking me for pictures, because sometimes I don’t feel worthy like that.”

This strange new status has manifested itself in other ways.

Seven months had passed since the Games by the time she climbed back into the ring for last month’s Strandja International tournament in Bulgaria. It didn’t feel as if all eyes were on her in Sofia, there was no sense of extra pressure. Or so she thought. Her coach, Noel Burke, said he had never seen his charge look as stressed.

She was amazed by that. And fascinated at how her opponents welcomed her back.

“I don’t think I boxed to the best that I can box when I was out there. I have a target on my back and they’re really, really trying… They’re trying to take me off the mat, basically. They’re getting more dirty as well.”

How so?

“As in like… It’s not even… They’re not even boxing anymore, just doing dirty little tactics. Like, if you get close, they’re trying to push your head down or pushing their hand up into your face. You know, all silly little things, but I just keep laughing and it pisses them off even more then.”

Winning another gold medal was the best answer of all but the nature of amateur boxing meant that her four fights in a highly-rated event were contested far from the madding crowds we like to associate with big-time occasions. Harrington has been plugging away regardless, doing the necessary ever since the Olympic euphoria finally began to ebb.

Training has remained a pillar, even through a nine-day holiday in Portugal when she couldn’t quite shake work mode and her partner Mandy had to talk her down from the mad notion of entering the Nationals when the adrenaline of her big win in the Far East was still surging through her system.

Next week will see her act alongside Ellen Keane as Grand Marshall for Dublin’s St Patrick’s Day parade – an honour she spoke about at great length while reminiscing on her own days watching it as a child - and there is the small matter of her wedding before the World Championships are held in May in Istanbul.

“I still have a bit to do. I still have to get shoes, and a bag, and organise a bus, flowers, rings. But, look, it’s going. The main thing is I’ll be there and she’ll be there, and that’s all that matters. Hopefully she’ll be there!”

This is, then, an athlete and a person who appears to be just as comfortable in her own skin as she was before the country dialled in to her frequency in Japan and that sense of calm extends to the ongoing questions over the very future of boxing in the Olympic rings.

Left off the list of guaranteed sports for the LA Games in 2028 due to the code’s governance issues, the world body has been given until 2023 to get their house in order. Troubled times may yet be ahead, though Harrington can’t see the worst happening.

“Look, I can never see them taking boxing out of the Olympics. The Olympics is boxing, know what I mean? I can never see that happening, I just can’t see that happening. I don’t worry about it because me worrying isn’t going to change any decisions anyways, but I just can’t see it happening.

“It was the same thing for when Covid happened. People were, ‘Oh, like, it’s not going to happen, the Olympics will be cancelled’. I was like, ‘Look, it will be what it will be. It will happen eventually’. There is no point in worrying over something that hasn’t even happened yet.”

Kellie Harrington was speaking at the unveiling of Permanent TSB as the title sponsor for both the Irish Olympic and Irish Paralympic teams at the Paris 2024 Games