Kellie Harrington still packing a punch for Ireland's elite boxers
The IABA's high performance boss Jon Mackey said he will "have a conversation with Kellie towards the end of the year to see what next year looks like". Pic: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
Jack Marley was a raw 18-year-old fresh out of Monkstown when Bernard Dunne invited him into the golden circle that is Irish boxing’s elite high-performance unit out at the Sports Ireland Campus in Abbotstown.
This was a month before the Tokyo Olympics and the place was hopping.
Seven boxers were booked in for the Covid-delayed Games in Japan and the pace in the rings and on the pads would go through the roof whenever Dunne, then the high-performance boss, would step onto the floor.
“I walked into it when the kitchen was hot,” said Marley before joining the Olympic ranks in Paris last year. This wasn’t a step up, more of a quantum leap, and the teenager loved the proximity it offered to the best fighters, the best coaches and the best facilities.
If he could see, why couldn’t he be, too?
One of that seven bound for Asia then was Kellie Harrington who would win her first Olympic gold medal at sumo’s Ryoguku Kokugikan, flirt with retirement, go again, retain her lightweight title in Paris at Roland Garros, then bring the curtain down on her career.
Harrington talked about how she had no more mountains to climb last summer, and of the next chapter and the life she would share with her wife Mandy. She envisioned a time when she wouldn’t have to look at the scales every morning.
Already 34, she explained how she wanted “to be able to do whatever type of training I want to do” post-Paris and kept alive the possibility that, while she might compete domestically in the future, her days in the international game were done.
At amateur or at pro.
Being announced as a member of the federation’s elite, high-performance unit last January prompted a repeat of that stance. There would be no grand comeback in the offing, she insisted. Now, 12 months since Paris, and she is still in the HPU (High Performance Unit).
The Irish Athletic Boxing Association’s (IABA) new high-performance boss is Jon Mackey. Just four months into the job, he explained on Monday how Harrington is entitled to support from the federation and Sport Ireland for a full year after the Games.
“Kellie always has a plan,” he said. “Any questions around Kellie not retiring from boxing are questions for Kellie. What I can say is that she's training away. She's on an individualised training programme for her on the back of Paris. She's still active.
“She's still very much part of what we do in the unit, in the high-performance unit. I've no doubt Kellie will be watching the World Championships [in September] and willing everybody on, including the 60-kilo boxer Zara Breslin, who was selected.
“And we'll have a conversation with Kellie towards the end of the year to see what next year looks like. At the moment, I'm not sure, other than to say I'm happy to see her continuously and consistently training and keeping herself in good spirits.”
Which brings us back to Marley.
There were no Olympic champions in the building when he walked in four years ago. Imagine the impression the sight of someone like Harrington now would have on the latest in the long line of up-and-comers looking to walk in the same shoes.
A woman with nine major championship medals in all. A national figure.
Mackey takes the point. It’s one thing to see an Olympic champion on TV, another thing again to walk into the gym in Dublin and see them pounding the pads with a Zaur Antia or a Damian Kennedy. The inspirational becomes tangible. Visible.
“Boxers like Kellie and any of those boxers that came through the Paris cycle set a standard. They bring a certain standard to the unit. They hold each other accountable in terms of what a high-performance lifestyle is. You don't have to teach any new boxer coming in what a high-performance lifestyle looks like.
“Once you put them in with the team, they'll pick these things up as they go along and they become part of the fabric and they become cultured by it. It's very important that we have people like Kellie around, and others of course, that we capitalise on that and make best use of it.”
For now, the focus rests entirely on those World Championships mentioned earlier. Breslin is one of 17 boxers Ireland will send to the M&S Arena in Liverpool for what will be the first senior tournament hosted by the nascent World Boxing body.
The tournament starts on September 4th.
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