Kellie Harrington: Without sport, I don’t know where I would be

Tokyo 2020 remains the prize on which Kellie Harrington has her eyes for now but the reigning amateur lightweight world champion is coming around to the idea of making the leap to the professional ranks before she hangs up her gloves.

Kellie Harrington: Without sport, I don’t know where I would be

Tokyo 2020 remains the prize on which Kellie Harrington has her eyes for now but the reigning amateur lightweight world champion is coming around to the idea of making the leap to the professional ranks before she hangs up her gloves.

The Dubliner has always been firm in her stance that the pro game isn’t for her. Her opinion on the nature of it hasn’t changed much given she still regards it as a business that can chew you up and spit you out rather than a sport, but there is a willingness now to at least explore the option.

Why the change of heart?

She is 29 now and the realisation is beginning to dawn that she can’t box as an amateur forever. Not with Father Time ticking along and a promising generation of talented female prospects bubbling through.

World champion boxer Kellie Harrington and Tilly Byrne-McGettigan, 10, from Wicklow, help launch Dare to Believe, a school activation programme, with the Olympic Federation of Ireland. Picture: Seb Daly/Sportsfile
World champion boxer Kellie Harrington and Tilly Byrne-McGettigan, 10, from Wicklow, help launch Dare to Believe, a school activation programme, with the Olympic Federation of Ireland. Picture: Seb Daly/Sportsfile

“If I got a decent offer, I would take it if I knew I was going to be happy. If it affected my own mental state and it put pressure on me I wouldn’t do it and I would be happy to go back and work in St Vincent’s Hospital in Fairview. I don’t mind that.”

Harrington’s path has already taken her through many of the same staging points as Katie Taylor and it may be that the Bray woman’s experiences in the professional game dictate whether or not she — and many other female boxers — make that switch.

Taylor is unbeaten through 12 bouts ahead of her next appearance, in Philadelphia in March, but the prospects of her fighting again in Ireland have been declared unlikely by manager Brian Peters as a result of security concerns surrounding the pro scene in this country right now.

Harrington would dearly love to see Taylor perform in her home country again and knows that the Olympic champion feels the same, but she isn’t all that au fait with the complexities of the wider landscape to give a definitive take on all of that.

She has more than enough on her plate as is.

The World Championships are the priority this year and, before that, the European Games. She will approach both as the reigning world champ after her superb showing in India late last year and yet that status has still to sink in.

Thailand’s Sudaporn Seesondee was the fighter beaten on a split decision in that 2018 final and Harrington reacted with bemusement when reminded of the rumours that her rival’s camp has since been tailoring aspects of their training with the Irishwoman in mind.

“It doesn’t make me feel anything, it makes me feel that she is a bloody eejit training just for me. Why would you do that? Because you could be beaten by someone else before she meets me. Realistically, we will be on opposite sides of the draw because I will be number one seed and she will be number two.

“We probably won’t meet ’til the final anyway. She has to get there first. I don’t see what the point is training for one person when you have a whole… I haven’t been training for the past 15 years to get to the Olympics. I have been training for the last 15 years for Kellie Harrington to become a better person and to get a better life.”

She isn’t the only one benefiting from that.

Harrington is an ambassador for the north-east inner-city with Dublin City Council and she has taken on a similar role now for the Olympic Federation of Ireland’s Dare to Believe programme which will see athletes visit schools to promote the benefits of sport.

She has given those talks before and knows the odds. You might strike a chord with two kids from a class of 30, but she sees the effect that her own success has had on people in her area, even if she still finds it a touch embarrassing when children give her a shout out on the streets.

Some even knock on her mother’s door asking for her.

“That’s brilliant,” she laughed. “That’s a positive impact. I know it’s having some kind of positive impact on kids and there is a lot of kids that need it. They need that role model, a go-getter, for all aspects of life and I’m just trying to get that out there.

Without sport, I don’t know where I would be. The focus and the discipline in sport is amazing. Through boxing, it has given me focus and given me discipline to go on and do different things and to be even sitting here today (giving interviews) is mad.

The sense in the wake of last weekend’s Irish Elite National Championships is that not everyone seems to have grasped what they have in Harrington who, after Taylor and Michael Conlon, is just the third amateur boxing world champion that Ireland has produced.

With no domestic opponent on the bill, Harrington earned her ninth Irish title without throwing a punch, but a bout with Sweden’s Jelena Jelic was organised in its stead — and then relegated to the back end of the gargantuan programme at the National Stadium.

“I don’t actually know if the crowd stuck around, that’s being honest with you, but I don’t think they did. I should have been on earlier. I don’t know why I was the second-last, like, I don’t know.

“There were people there, it wasn’t empty by any means (but) if you’re coming down from Donegal to watch the first fight at six o’clock, are you going to hang around until half-ten? There’s not a hope.

“Now I’ll not lie, I’ll tell the truth, if I was there at six o’clock to watch... I don’t know, my brother, even though he doesn’t box, and there was a world champion on at half-ten and I’m living up in Donegal or in Galway, I’m not sticking around. Do you know what I mean?

But I would love to see that. Halfway through the programme would have been perfect but that’s me out with a straight answer.

She’s refreshingly full of them.

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