Harrington’s win provides gold lining for boxing clubs after tough pandemic

Entering Crumlin Boxing Club, one quickly hears the sound of coach Phil Sutcliffe barking out a mix of admonitions and encouragements to an array of sweat-laden fighters.

They are just about to finish up their training for the day. Some are cycling exercise bikes. Others are hitting boxing bags – hard. A few are sparring in the ring.

Sutcliffe stands by the ropes, with a bird’s-eye view of all. A two-time Olympian and the coach to a myriad of champions, he is the club’s talisman, the one who has led it through all of its highs and lows since the 1990s.

Crumlin Boxing Club, like many others of its kind across the country, has had a difficult Covid-19 pandemic with activities severely curtailed.

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For now, though, he is delighted with the Olympic success of lightweight gold medallist Kellie Harrington. "I've worked with Kellie a few times, yeah. She's an extraordinary talent. Always getting better," he said.

"It will give a spur on for the boxing in Ireland, yes, of course. It will increase the popularity of the sport. It will increase it for a while and that will hopefully stay at a level that will keep the kids in boxing.

“The young girls now in boxing are achievers. If you watch the juvenile championships, they’re a faction on their own. They seem to be learning much quicker than some of the boys even.”

The lockdown has hit the club’s youngest members especially hard, he adds. “They went elsewhere. Some got into trouble, some didn’t. Some are still playing computer games. A lot are starting to drift back in now.”

“[But] a lot are not back yet, and I don’t think they’ll ever be back,” he says.

“We try to bring the kids away every year, which is something we’ve missed very much... To lose that, it’s like a wet sponge that keeps getting wetter. There’s no enthusiasm there. They need competition.”

Over the months, the club tried out a slew of measures to keep younger members involved, including outdoor sessions in Willie Pearse Park and Zoom calls involving a coach and up to 30 children, he tells The Irish Times.

The Zoom sessions started off well but after a time, the children “weaned off” the online training, says Sutcliffe. “It’s nothing like the real thing.”

Some things are getting back to normal. In late June, a few of the club's professionals travelled to Alicante for the Celtic Clash 11 tournament, where Jake Hanney and Robert Burke both had first-round knock-out victories.

He speaks of each boxer with pride, including recently turned professional Cian Doyle.

Doyle believes the club handled the pandemic well and is grateful that it is getting back to normal, saying, “I missed it a lot. I wasn’t doing anything” during the shutdown.

Sutcliffe proudly details all the club’s past refurbishments and changes, comments on the impeccable cleanliness of the changing rooms, and shows off the club’s state-of-the-art sauna.

Having spent decades coaching countless young boxers, hearing their struggles and watching their lives unfold, sometimes well and sometimes not, Sutcliffe is passionate about the subject of mental health.

The restrictions were, in his eyes, too strict and it has affected people’s emotional wellbeing, he says. Backing up his point, he cites the disturbances in early June in Dublin city centre. “I think there’s some terrible things happening to kids.

“Hindsight is great and we don’t always have it [but] some of the younger generations are going crazy. They’ve missed college, they’re stuck in their room on Zoom calls. Then, they get a bit of freedom, and they go mad.

“There are kids self-harming – girls and boys – or isolated and feeling pain and getting bullied on the phone. The kids take that seriously. Some kids coming into the club and you’re trying to drag the words out of them,” he says.

The club is run in conjunction with Dublin City Council, which Sutcliffe says they are "blessed" to be partnered with, receiving a grant during the pandemic to keep going.

This support, coupled with boxing’s latest Olympic moment in the sun, gives Sutcliffe reason for cheer after some tough months. Glancing at the hundreds of pictures on the wall of current and former members of the club, he declares: “There’ll be a bona fide boxing club here forever.”