Gavan Casey

The 42 Editor’s note: This article by Gavan Casey forms part of The 42′s subscriber-only coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympics, with unique insights and fresh perspectives on the biggest stories every single day. If you’d enjoy more great sportswriting like this, you can sign up here for a free one-month trial to The 42.

AT AROUND MIDDAY before Kellie Harrington boxed for gold in Paris, her former Irish teammate Joe Ward posted a message to his Instagram story wishing her luck.

It featured a photograph of three-time European champion Ward, Irish boxing’s head trainer Zaur Antia, and Harrington. Ward chose for its backing track ‘Simply The Best’ by Tina Turner.

Harrington on Tuesday night proved Ward’s point: she’s better than all the rest.

Better than Ward himself, a six-time major international medallist. Better than her fellow Olympic boxing icons like Michael Carruth, Mick Conlan and John Joe Nevin. And yes, in terms of barefaced boxing talent in the unpaid code, better than Katie Taylor.

Consider that sacrilege if you like — but consider as well that in an all-time list, I would rank Taylor above virtually every other Irish sportsperson for both her longevity as a world-leading athlete and for her cultural impact outside the ring, where she has twice transformed her sport on a more profound level than anyone from this country has ever done their own.

But strictly in the amateur ring, over the last six years, Kellie Harrington has become the best to ever do it from this country.

Taylor’s seminal London 2012 success was plainly hard-earned but it was only for the Olympic cycles that followed that several of boxing’s new powers began to pump money into their own female programmes. Olympic boxing is now an absolute dogfight for women just as it always has been for men. And Harrington has twice shot every opponent out of the sky, manoeuvring her way to the top of the podium in both Tokyo and Paris.

She’s 34 years old but she’s the latest tech: Harrington is the universal boxer, the kind of athlete that a kid these days would call a ‘cheat code’.

She can box as picture-perfectly from a southpaw stance as she can from her natural orthodox position, and she can transition between the two with a fluidity that makes it practically imperceptible until she throws her next backhand. She can beat you from range, she can beat you in a phonebooth. You can’t out-muscle her, you can’t out-hustle her. You definitely can’t out-box her.

So, what do you do if you’re drawn to face Kellie Harrington? Simple: you take your spot beneath her on the podium and you clap your hands as the tricolour is raised.

That’s not to intentionally disrespect China’s beaten finalist on Tuesday night, Yang Wenlu, who put in a fine performance in falling short.

But that the reigning Asian champion, who beat Harrington in her first World Championship final in 2016, got no closer to beating the Irishwoman than anyone else in Harrington’s seven preceding Olympic bouts across 2021 and 2024 only emphasises it: Harrington has stood peerless in female lightweight boxing’s most competitive era.

And the stylish, smiling nature of her Paris semi-final victory over Beatriz Ferreira, the consensus world no.2 against whom Harrington won gold in Tokyo, can now enter the canon: all along, Harrington was making the whole thing look slightly easier the second time around. She wrapped Tuesday night’s final up in two rounds and conspicuously enjoyed the knock-around in the third.

There was a tweet the other night decrying the lack of female representation on RTÉ’s boxing panel ahead of Harrington’s semi-final victory over Beatriz Ferreira. That grievance felt forced in 2024: for one thing, there are surely very few kids at home who dream of emulating pundits. For another, there was surely no more all-embracing means of summing up this Kellie Harrington’s significance to her country than Ken Egan’s protracted sigh of sheer angst as RTÉ threw to the ringwalks.

Harrington herself featured regularly as an analyst on RTÉ’s boxing coverage during the Rio 2016 Games, just over a month after being beaten by Tuesday’s Olympic final opponent, Yang, in her maiden World Championship decider.

Harrington had competed at those Worlds — and for most of her international career to that point — up at 64kg/light-welterweight, with Katie Taylor occupying the Olympic berth at 60/lightweight. (Harrington actually walked around at 59 or 60 kilos at the time; rather than endure a weight cut, she used to have to put on weight to box for Ireland on the big stage).

Harrington had begun her plot to overthrow reigning Olympic champion Taylor in late 2015. She won the 2016 Irish Seniors — to which Taylor didn’t enter — down at lightweight. Her challenge ultimately never materialised, however, and Taylor went to Rio. As Harrington would later tell Kevin Byrne in an interview in The Irish Sun: “I didn’t try because Katie was there and you’d wanna bleedin’ hit Katie with a stool to beat her, like!”

But when Finland’s Mira Potkonen did as much — in a manner of speaking, anyway — to eliminate Taylor from the Rio Games, Harrington was the only member of RTÉ’s panel to criticise Taylor’s performance. She warned that she would be waiting for the Braywoman at the next Seniors back home. But a crossroads bout instead became a sliding-doors moment: Taylor went to America for a few weeks, turned professional, and stayed there. She and Harrington never met in the ring.

On Tuesday night’s RTÉ panel, Ken Egan, Darren O’Neill and Bernard Dunne credited Harrington for waiting her turn behind Taylor for several years before blazing her own trail. It was understandably made to sound like a story of personal resilience but in reality, it required a lot more than that.

On countless occasions during the mid-2010s, Harrington would burst through the doors of the family home on Portland Row in tears and her talk of stepping away from boxing altogether was far from performative.

As such, Ireland owes two of the 15 Olympic gold medals in its history to Yvonne and Christy Harrington, as well as Kellie’s brothers Christopher, Aaron and Joel.

Harrington has since gone on to cast her own shadow over the likes of Amy Broadhurst, for whom history broadly repeated itself.

But Harrington’s slice of history in Roland Garros tonight makes her a truly singular Irish boxing figure: the first ever two-time Olympic champion from these shores.

It’s less a shadow, now, and more a total eclipse. Current and former Irish teammates, including Broadhurst with whom she has been at peace for several years, will forever revere Harrington.

The beauty of her success is that scores of future Irish boxers will seek to emulate her. The magnitude of her success is such that almost all of them will fail.

The tears in Dublin 1 on Tuesday night, and again upon Harrington’s return from Paris, will be those of joy.

Despite her vow to retire from boxing during her post-fight interview on RTÉ, it’s too raw to speak of her career in the past tense.

Not so soon after Kellie Harrington proved herself simply the best, better than all the rest.

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