'40 is the new 30, isn’t it?': ageless Katie Taylor firing and ready for final fight

Both fighters strutted their stuff for maybe 2-300 people at The Helix theatre on Dublin’s northside on Wednesday evening and the speed of the home favourite’s jabs looked as sharp as ever before. She looks ready, and she sounds ready.

ONCE UPON A TIME: Katie Taylor with her coach Ross Enamait. Pic: ©INPHO/Gary Carr

The lasts are piling up, the work all but done. Tuesday’s last press conference was followed 24 hours later by Katie Taylor’s last public workout. One last weigh-in, one last ring walk, and it’ll be time for her last fight.

Croke Park, in front of 82,000 people. A first. Even now. Even for this trailblazer. This builder of dreams.

Taylor will climb into the ring with Flora Pili, a French fighter eleven years her junior, who stands two feet taller and boasts a slightly greater reach, but someone with a fraction of the experience and, we have to assume, technical ability.

One last opponent.

Both women strutted their stuff for maybe 2-300 people at The Helix theatre on Dublin’s northside on Wednesday evening and the speed of the home favourite’s jabs looked as sharp as ever before. She looks ready, and she sounds ready.

“I feel great,” she said from the stage. “I think 40 is the new 30, isn’t it? I obviously just turned 40 a few weeks ago but I feel great, thank god. It’s been an amazing few months preparing for the fight.

“I love a tough fight, I love a challenge. This isn’t going to be a walk in the park. I purposely chose this tough challenge for my last fight. I built my reputation taking tough fights my whole career so why treat my last fight any differently?”

The breadth of her popularity has been apparent for years but it was spelled out in the most emphatic of fashions yet when all 82,000 tickets for this farewell were shifted inside half-an-hour at the start of summer.

Taylor is someone who has come to transcend her sport, and sport itself, by chasing new horizons and conquering new worlds that, until she challenged the orthodoxy, existed only in her imagination.

The crowd that gathered to watch her punch shadows on Thursday night was a repository of young and old, male and female. Some were boxing people to the core, others were curious moths attracted to the bright light of an ageless champion.

With the ‘workout’ done, Taylor was joined in the ring by ten-year old Clodagh Keating from Dublin, a girl without an attachment to any boxing club, but whose Katie t-shirt and floods of tears as she processed what was happening said it all.

“This is what it’s all about for me,” said Taylor of her young fan’s moment. “You just have to enjoy it. I’m so grateful that I get to do this. I actually love every single day, today, the last few days, the last ring walk and just looking back at the last three years in the ring. I’m overwhelmed.”

She isn’t alone.

Katie Taylor with young fan Clodagh Keating, age 10, from Dublin, during a public workout session, held at The Helix in DCU, Dublin. Pic: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile

Every fighter on the undercard took their turn to jab, duck and weave for the punters on Wednesday evening. Everyone makes the same moves and stands in the same poses at these things, and that uniformity extended to the few words they gave after.

Molly McCann, Taylor’s cousin and former MMA fighter who takes on Sylwia Doligala in a bantamweight fight, summed up the giddiness of what’s about to unfold in GAA HQ at the weekend in her heavy Liverpool twang.

“It’s fucking Dublin isn’t it, why wouldn’t you be buzzin? I haven’t got much to say other than, I swear to God, every second of every round I’m going to make sure you have a great night. This is a once in a lifetime thing and I don’t take it for granted.”

Thomas Carty, who faces Dave Allen in a heavyweight bout, echoed the once-in-a-lifetime line and spoke for the rest of the bill when prioritising the need to see to their own gardens first and follow it by giving the headliner a “proper send-off” at the night’s end.

Taylor has embraced the romantic side to all this while insisting it will be business as usual come the appointed hour. This is a win that she badly wants and desperately needs, for her and, it seems, for everyone else too.

“The last three years, my whole career, you guys have been with me from the start. Ye were with me throughout the London 2012 Olympics, were with me through the heartbreak of Rio and when I went into the pros. I’m so grateful.”