Punching above Their Weight by McGoldrick Sean;

Punching above Their Weight by McGoldrick Sean;

Author:McGoldrick, Sean; [Sean McGoldrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4782446
Publisher: O'Brien Press, Limited, The
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter 12

Bonanza in Beijing

‘Naturally, I counted the scores, and I won it by two or three points. But, look, I hold no grudges against Zhang. If I was offered any medal at the start of the game, I would have taken it with both hands.’

Kenny Egan

The Beijing Workers’ Gymnasium, originally built in 1961 for the World Table Tennis Championships, hosted the boxing programme at the 2008 Olympics. Kenny Egan was in action in the first session. Although it is slightly more than 8,000 kilometres from his native Neilstown to downtown Beijing, Egan wasn’t short of support. Chants of ‘Kenny! Kenny! Kenny!’ resonated around the arena that Saturday afternoon as he pummelled his opponent from the Virgin Islands, Julius Jackson, 22-2: the same boxer he had stopped at the World Championships in Chicago. High up in the bleachers, Gary Keegan watched in stoic silence.

Egan was exuberant; he bounced into the mixed-zone afterwards where the boxers and coaches meet the media. And, in what turned out to be a prophetic comment, he told RTÉ’s Marty Morrissey that he was the first Irishman in action and would be the last one out.

But it wasn’t until twenty-year-old John Joe Joyce stepped into the ring the following morning that ringside observers got the first indication that this was a very special Irish team. Egan’s fight was as straightforward as one can reasonably expect at Olympic level. Joyce’s battle against his ‘bogeyman’, the Hungarian boxer Gyula Káté, was the exact opposite.

The portrait of St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, tattooed on Joyce’s right forearm seemed an appropriate portent for what might transpire. After all, the Hungarian had accumulated seventy-nine points against the St Michael’s Athy boxer in their last three contests.

‘Sixty-four boxers in the Worlds and I drew him in the first round. This time when I drew him again, I was thinking, “There’s something meant to be,”’ remarked Joyce to journalists in the mixed zone, after prevailing 9-5 against his nemesis in a tactical contest. ‘I’ve drawn him so many times that I knew God was going to be on my side this time.’

Having celebrated his nineteenth birthday just nine weeks previously, John Joe Nevin was Ireland’s youngest male competitor in Beijing. ‘It was hard on me because I was so young,’ he recalled four years later in an interview in the Irish Independent on the eve of his first fight at the London Olympics.

Arguably, this uncertainty impacted on his performance because he never quite reached the heights he scaled at the qualifying tournament in Pescara. Nonetheless, he won his opening bout – beating African champion Abdelhalim Ouradi from Algeria 9-4, despite being docked two points in the first round of a scrappy contest.

The Irish were now on a roll. Egan underlined this growing confidence when he outclassed Bahram Muzaffer, the Turkish boxer who had received the late call-up, to win 10-2 and nail down a place in the last eight – one win away from a coveted medal. Just as the decision



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