BOXING:Ireland's boxers were the pride of the nation after delivering four medals in an ExCel summer, writes JOHNNY WATTERSON
A year of years in boxing. They rolled out the red carpet in Dublin’s Mansion House for a traveller from Mullingar, a kid from west Belfast, a light flyweight from the Ardoyne and a girl from a council estate in Bray. The politicians love-bombed the boxers as Ireland looked to a few marginalised communities and to a sport that has traditionally had to dazzle to draw a second glance.
Four years on from Beijing, boxing was again Ireland’s Olympic buoyancy aid that kept national dignity above the water line and where the act of winning led the nation into a collective act of believing. People staked an emotional claim on the team and they allowed their moods swing with the scorecards of judges.
The lugubrious ExCel Arena became a kilometre stretch of drama and tears, an east London strip of cavernous halls and a central walkway too modern to house ghosts but vast enough to bury dreams.
It will be recalled time and time again when the boxing historians pick over the bones of the summer that Ireland finished fifth on the boxing medal table above the People’s Republic of China and the USA.
In the commotion it was easy to forget where some of it came from. The Bray gym without heating or showers, where boxers charged up the road dodging the rain drops to use the toilets in the Harbour Bar. From cold and hardship often comes gold and that was the way it was.
It began as soon as John Joe Nevin stepped into the ring for his first bantamweight fight on July 28th and sparked a chain reaction that pitched and rolled from day to day. As the team picked their way through the draw, welterweight Adam Nolan came into the game. Then captain Darren O’Neill won his round-of-32 bout before falling to German middleweight Stefan Hartel one match away from a bronze medal fight. Garda Nolan also went through to the round of 16 before succumbing 18-9 to the eventual bronze medallist Andrey Zamkovoy.
Two fell, four moved on, Nolan and O’Neill left standing still, illustrating how boxing almost always writes a personal narrative. But those names, ones people may never have known before London 2012, were given a sense of importance and place, their struggles in the docklands cutting across the usual demographic paths. Hand in hand everyone walked.
It was Nevin who boldly began the sweep towards a final and three days after his first fight he had secured a bronze medal meeting with Fierro Valdez before light flyweight Paddy Barnes or Michael Conlan had even stepped into the ring for their opening bouts. The two Belfast boys then began to press home their cases undeterred, the scrapper Barnes finally losing out on a place in the final on a 15-15 count back against China’s Shimming Zou and Conlan falling short in his semi-final bout against Cuba’s Robeisy Ramírez.
It was Conlan’s first Olympics and first medal, Barnes’ second Olympics and second bronze, for him an historical Irish first of two boxing medals from different Games.
Nevin went in for gold against Britain’s Luke Campbell with the scalp of the reigning bantamweight world champion Lázaro Álvarez of Cuba in his pocket after a breathless three rounds of dominance and occasional toying. Perhaps the Cuban was Nevin’s final this time round, the day and gold falling to Yorkshire man Campbell 14-11.
Katie came into the scene just as the men were in full flow but radiant none-theless; August 7th her Olympic debut against Britain’s Natasha Jonas. The party may have started but the lightweight’s arrival brought renewed fervour and a broader dimension to the understanding of women’s boxing.
It’s a conceit of the Olympics that nothing else compares and when Katie arrived not everyone would have known that she carried the World Championship crown, her fourth in succession won earlier that year in China.
But she and Jonas were as much a performance as a fight, an Olympic audition that not so much soared but ignited the competition. It was full blown, high tempo aggression. An eye opener. If there were still sceptics who needed converting, the fight was a tour de force that gave some answers, Jonas’s scorched-earth policy failing to the superior Irish girl.
The 26-year-old from Bray won it 26-15 and met Mavzuna Chorieva in the semi-final. More tactics, less high octane, the ExCel rumbled again as she picked off the Tajikistani boxer in death by a 1,000 cuts, winning 17-9. Sofya Ochigava, impertinent, dangerously smart and tough aired pre-final opinions that the Irish economy was on its knees because of the money paid over to the boxing judges and that the already canonised Katie was horribly venal. Quickly disproved as the Russian went ahead, the Olympic final was as predicted by her father and coach Pete, tactical and miserly.
But Katie could punch with Jonas or play chess with Ochigava. A counter-puncher against the world’s best boxer, the fight was a study in point-scoring and patience. Artful and measured, the 10,000 in the arena fell nervously quiet for most of it as Ochigava surged over the first two rounds and crucially nicked a lead before Katie came back. A knife-edge final round fell Ireland’s way and the dam burst in the ExCel.
Katie looked up to her God and then fell to her knees. That’s the image we hold. Oldcourt, her estate in Bray, erupted and 20,000 prepared to paint the town gold.
If ever a silver from Nevin and two bronzes from Conlan and Barnes could be so monstrously construed as a support act, this, absurdly, may have been the year. It was a year of years.
