– Niall Kelly reports from Riocentro, Rio de Janeiro
AFTER A ROCKY week for Irish boxing, you could forgive any slight doubts starting to creep in.
But Katie Taylor is ready to send a message to the world and prove that she remains the queen of women’s lightweight boxing.
Ireland’s Olympic champion opens her gold medal defence this afternoon (3pm Irish time) in the quarter-finals against a familiar foe, Mira Potkonen of Finland.
Win and she will be guaranteed bronze at least, Ireland’s second medal of the Rio Games.
But Taylor and the Irish team have their sights set on much more than that.
“She’s good,” coach Eddie Bolger said as final preparations continued over the weekend.
She’s well stimulated, still the joker of the camp which people might find hard to believe, but she’s very professional and she knows her opponent very well, the Finnish girl.
“It’s about implementing the tactics. Over four rounds this is very important, because we don’t want to end up with draws.
“It’s about doing it from start to finish.”
Bolger’s determination to avoid draws refers back to Taylor’s scrap with France’s Estelle Mossely at the world championships in May, one of two recent defeats which have pierced her aura of invincibility.
Taylor clearly won all four rounds on one of the judges’ cards but the other two scored it 38-38, and then sided with Mossely to give her a split decision win and deny Taylor a sixth straight world title.
It came hot on the heels of a shock defeat to Yana Alekseevna at the European Olympic qualifier in April and raised questions as to whether Taylor, the pre-eminent force in women’s boxing for so long, was finally starting to wane as she approached her 30th birthday.
A change in her corner, with father Pete stepping away from the setup, added another unknown to the mix.
“I’m not worried because the performances weren’t bad and the decisions were bad,” Bolger said, “but I don’t want to criticise too much.
“Her performance was good, she’s not lacking in any confidence, and she is always looking to improve.
She’s looking forward to it. She’s not carrying any baggage from what happened and class is permanent, as they say.
“She’s not any less of a fighter for those decisions.”
Taylor starts the week as the odds-on favourite in the 60kg division with a chance to make history as the first Irish woman to win gold at back-to-back Olympics.
A grudge match against Alekseevna potentially awaits in the semi-finals, with Mossely, America’s Mikaela Mayer and the dangerous Russian Anastasiia Beliakova set to duke it out on the opposite side of the draw.
But first, Potkonen.
