Jack Marley: 'I’m an athlete going to the Olympic Games. Of course I’m aspiring for gold'
SITTING PRETTY: Irish heavyweight boxer Jack Marley is focusing on his training as others attempt to qualify for the Olympics next week. Picture: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
This next month will bring the Olympics into finer focus for a whole raft of Irish contenders. Stick a pin in a world map and you probably won’t be far removed from a badminton player, a triathlete, a cyclist, a boxer or a track and field athlete pushing for Paris.
An eight-strong boxing team, made up of three women and five men, will land in Milan on Thursday and take the 20-minute spin east to the town of Busto Arsizio where the latest qualifying tournament gets underway at the weekend.
Jack Marley won’t be one of them.
The Sallynoggin heavyweight has completed that part of the journey courtesy of a silver medal performance at last summer’s European Games in Poland. It left him with a full year and more to fill and it’s only now that he realises how beneficial that was.
“It was huge. I didn’t really appreciate it, how early I had qualified, until now when I see the rest of the lads going off to Milan this week for their qualifiers. I can just stay here and focus on my training.”
Marley was one of five Irish boxers to book passage to the Games in Nowy Targ. Kellie Harrington assured herself of a chance to defend her lightweight title, Michaela Walsh and Aoife O’Rourke booked a second Games, and Dean Clancy a first.
The hope is that maybe another three can join them between this foray to Italy and the third and last qualifying window which opens and closes in Bangkok in late May/early June. Ireland had seven boxers in Tokyo and eight in Rio in 2016.
There’s no bad time to confirm your status as an Olympian but conventional wisdom has it that the earlier the better. Doing it on the doorstep of the Games themselves leaves little enough time to come down and get back up. Ask the men’s rugby sevens after 2021.
Marley won’t worry about any of that.
He was a little kid and more into his football as a budding right-back with St Joseph’s Boys when he first stepped into the gym at Monkstown Boxing Club, and only 20 years of age when he became their first fighter to make it to the most august stage of them all.
The response was bedlam.
“I had a big homecoming outside the front of my house. I wouldn’t say outside the house because the whole road was full of kids and parents and friends and family. That was my homecoming, I didn’t really have anything down at the club.
“No, definitely didn’t need it after that. I knew there was going to be a few people there but I didn’t think there was going to be that many. It was just crazy. Flags, fireworks, DJ speakers, everything.” It’s not as if he’s been idle since.
Marley won a silver medal at the prestigious Strandja tournament in Bulgaria recently, he’s confirmed for April’s European Championships and there is one, maybe two, more events besides that to keep him primed before France in high summer.
Marley’s medal in Poland last year was the first that Ireland, a nation with a long and illustrious tradition between the ropes, had earned in any major event at the heavyweight grade since Gearóid O Colmáin became European champ in 1947.
Still only 21, he seems remarkably unfazed by it all.
Spare time is passed by scrolling on his phone, swimming, going for walks, or just by eating, which he enjoys immensely. Neighbours and strangers stop him on the street for a chinwag but there is no weight of expectation felt on these shoulders.
“No, let people have their expectations,” he shrugged yesterday in Dublin. “I won’t find them out. If I do, I’ll just nudge them off anyway. Let everyone have their own little expectation and something to take them up to the Games.” There was a time towards his last year in school when he thought of pursuing a life in real estate but he knows there is no need to sell his dream or his story to anyone right now. The only way to do that will be in the Arena Paris Nord.
Do enough in the early rounds there and he will earn a transfer to Roland Garros where the medal fights are to be held. He’s young for a heavy. Most Olympic medallists in his class this last two decades were closer to their mid-20s when they stood on that podium.
He offers no promises and closes no doors.
“Anyone can medal. I’m an athlete going to the Olympic Games. Like, of course I’m aspiring for gold but I’m not saying this or I’m not going to put anything out there. I’m just going to do what I’ve always done, just one fight at a time.”
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