Inner battle the hardest to win when facing a two-time Olympic champion
Kellie Harrington (Red) with Kellie McLoughlin (Blue) during the lightweight final at the National Elites. Pic: ©INPHO/Dan Clohessy
The line of kids to get a picture with Kellie Harrington is still snaking across one corner of the National Stadium, Dean Clancy and Jason Nevin have already taken to the ring for the night’s next bout, and Kellie McLoughlin is shedding tears behind the curtain.
There is little room for privacy in this intimate, ancient arena.
Boxers can be heard thumping pads on nearby stairways as they await their turn on the card at the National Elites. Aoife O’Rourke, a world champion, sits half-a-dozen rows back as she takes in the early fights before suiting up for her decider.
Even the two tuck shops are shoehorned into spaces fit only for closets.
The thin drapes that cover the back wall between the ring and dressing-rooms in the adjacent building on the South Circular Road offer McLoughlin only a modicum of space, and it is invaded by well-meaning words from coaches, journalists and sundry others.
The 27-year old has just lost her Irish lightweight title to the back-to-back Olympic champion while gaining enormous respect from a crowd that came alive as the woman out of St Catherine’s BC traded blows with a Kellie whose surname is only needed on a passport.
“You did yourself proud,” says one woman as McLoughlin wipes her eyes.
Eventually, she gathers herself, guides the into a quieter stretch of the walkway so as to avoid blocking her fellow fighters and begins to explain just what it is like to face an opponent like Harrington who has conquered all of her known worlds.
“I think I had myself hyped up a bit too much,” she puts it after a first loss in 15 appearances. “What happened was I went out and I didn’t want to face the reality of who I was up against. That’s basically what happened.
“In the back of my mind I knew she was a two-time Olympic champ and I just [wanted to think] that I was going out boxing just a random girl. So the experience got the better of me at the end of the day.”
If it did then it’s not hard see why.
Harrington only declared her intention to return from retirement in October but she had never quit training at the High-Performance Unit’s base in Abbotstown in the wake of that second Olympic gold medal won in Paris in the summer of 2024.
McLoughlin pretty much knew that Harrington would be on the call sheet as soon as the dates for these Elites were confirmed back in August. That’s five months contemplating what it would be like to share a ring with a legend.
There was no hesitation at the opening bell. Both fighters lunged towards the middle of the canvas and greeted each other with a hail of punches, but the doubts began to insinuate themselves even as McLoughlin was going toe to toe.
She felt as if she was almost putting herself down.
“All the way through the fight I was thinking, ‘aw, she’s this and she’s that’. I shouldn’t even have been thinking that. I wasn’t myself. I really just wasn’t myself. I wasn’t with it at all. That’s why I’m so angry with myself.
“I’m annoyed. I didn’t do my best. I had everything prepared but when your mind isn’t prepared for going in against a two-time Olympian you don’t know what your mind is going to do. And at the end of the day it went a bit crazy.
“The thoughts were going mad in my head. I wasn’t present.”
Harrington had to ward off gremlins of her own. The 36-year old has never enjoyed the approach to fights. She had fretted on the prospect of fighting here again, in front of her own, some wanting her to lose and others desperate for her to win.
Her wife Mandy’s cries of ‘That’s it Harrington’ penetrated the surrounding darkness and the thicket of noise. The difference between the two fighters, apart from anything technical, was in how the older one corrupted any doubts for her own good.
“Today I felt like the underdog and I love that feeling of feeling like the underdog,” Harrington said. “It makes me want it more.”
Let’s state the obvious here. A boxing ring is not a good place to be wrestling with doubts and demons. Split-second decisions and delays can have lasting consequences, all the more so when the other fighter is best in class.
Harrington looked like she was enjoying herself by the second round. She let out a smile when walking in to one shot. There were more again as she found her rhythm. ‘Whoah, she beamed, her mouthguard gleaming, after one exchange.
McLoughlin, a former underage footballer and camogie underage player with Dublin, who took up boxing to stay fit, had seen class up close before having faced Michaela Walsh, who claimed a record 14th Elite title later on Saturday night.
“[There is] something with the Olympians and the years they have on me. They just almost know what to do straight away with you. It’s taken me a little bit of time. It’s experience. I started late enough.
“I was 16 when I started. The girls were probably on their fifth or sixth Irish titles.”
It’s not much consolation as she stands there in her singlet but McLoughlin can see how this will stand to her. So too does her father and coach Karl who has been standing protectively by her side for the last five minutes.
“It’s that experience on that big international stage” he says. To her as much as to this stranger interviewing his daughter. “Kellie just needs that little bit of experience. When she starts getting that, at Europeans and whatever, that’s when she will have the advantage.”
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