KURT WALKER WAS at a weird career juncture.

A European bronze medalist last year, a Commonwealth silver medalist this year, and still only a nipper at 23 — it’s not a bad trajectory entering the business end of an Olympic cycle.

He has been touted as one of Ireland’s finest boxing talents since his mid-teens, his skill perpetually evident; he won three Irish Senior Elite titles on the spin between 2015 and 2017 before injury cost him a chance at four-in-a-row in February.

He has beaten most of the highly-ranked bantamweights out there — enough to consider himself a top dog in his own right.

But until November of this year, Walker was yet to truly have his day.

What changed wasn’t merely the fact that he finally won his first gold medal at a major international tournament, draping gold around his neck at the EU Championships in Valladolid. It was the manner in which he did so: in the tournament’s bantamweight decider, the Lisburn stylist finally got the monkey off his back against a rival and regular foe, highly-touted Liverpudlian Peter McGrail, the ‘Scouse Lomachenko’ who had beaten Walker in the Commonwealth final on Australia’s Gold Coast just seven months prior.

Incredibly, Walker returned the favour against the reigning European champion despite breaking his thumb in the first of three rounds, adjusting to the most disastrous of complications with consummate composure.

And now, while still sporting a sore thumb, the Irish standout has a spring in his step.

Kurt Walker, Ireland's EU champion at 56kg. Ryan Byrne / INPHO Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO

“I was nervous getting in,” Walker admits. “There was this feeling, though — I knew something was definitely different this time; me, John [Conlan] and all the coaches had it down to a tee what we were going to do. We just had the whole fight planned out.

It actually nearly took me a round to start doing it properly. I was kind of half-doing it, and then I said to myself, ‘This is actually close enough — I might as well just go for it.’

“My mentality was different, but I’ve just come on leaps and bounds over the last few months, like,” he adds. “Even in the first I was going forward — you’d never really see me go forward like that.

I was standing my ground, kind of marching forward even though he’s a strong lad, he’s usually hard to push backwards. But once I was going forward, I broke his heart.

“How the thumb went — I threw a right hand-left hook [combination], and I just felt it on the left hook straight away. After that, you can kind of see that I didn’t really throw any more hooks — I was just throwing jabs.

It wasn’t too bad, though, pain-wise. Well, it probably comes down to adrenaline. It was kind of sore in the second, but in the third round, the pain almost disappeared. I didn’t really feel it anymore. I knew everything was on this last round.

“It was hard, like, to adjust — not being able to throw the left hook. I don’t know what it was… It was just… Like, I knew there was no time to dwell on it, so I switched to my jab.

“But I watched it back afterwards, and I did actually try to throw a couple of hooks after I’d broken it, and then I sort of stopped suddenly. So it must have been sore! I can’t really remember, to be honest with you. You’re concentrating on so many other things in the fight, maybe you don’t have time to think about it too much.

“It was unbelievable, though, to win it, especially after losing to McGrail in the Commonwealths.

I’d actually probably rather win the EUs, because it’s all of the best countries in Europe at my weight. The rest of them, I’d already beaten them anyway — the ones that weren’t there. I’d already beaten Azerbaijan and the Russian last year, so it didn’t really make a difference that they weren’t there. McGrail was the man to beat for me, like.

Kurt Walker and Peter McGrail in action at the Commonwealth Games in April of this year. Danny Lawson Danny Lawson

So, if McGrail is known as ‘The Scouse Lomachenko’, what does that make his recent conqueror?

“It makes me, eh… Eh… I don’t even know!” Walker laughs. “I’ll have to make up a name!

“…King Kurt!”

What’s that?

“King Kurt — that’s what they call me up in Lisburn, like,” Walker blurts out bashfully. “I’ll take that…”

He is also reluctantly willing to accept ‘The Lisburn Bud Crawford.’

Of course, like the aforementioned professional pound-for-pound stars, Walker is now intent on ruling the world. And only now does he truly believe such a feat to be within reach, his belief imbued by having seen off the majority of protagonists in the upper echelons of his division over the last couple of years.

Were it not for a deserved victory over old foe McGrail, he reckons he might have taken on next year’s Olympic qualifiers more so in blind hope than with a hard-earned confidence.

Walker now has his eyes firmly set on Olympic qualification, and he doesn't intend to make up the numbers should he reach Tokyo. Tommy Dickson / INPHO Tommy Dickson / INPHO / INPHO

“I was there or thereabouts for the last year-and-a-half, two years, like,” Walker says. “I was good. I knew that. But I needed to get that breakthrough. Right now was the perfect time to get it, a year before the Olympic run gets going.

If it didn’t get this breakthrough, it would have been touch and go next year. I would have had no confidence in myself.

“I’m 100% confident now that I should be qualifying for Tokyo. Beforehand… I wasn’t that confident, to tell you the truth. But I’m the man to beat now, and I know McGrail is going to be coming for me, to beat me back again. And my job is to make sure that doesn’t happen.

“See, I’d be a fairly confident person as it is, but there’s always that wee thought in the back of your head — the self-doubt.

My mind would always go back to times where I got beat — it could have been six years ago I got beat, and I’d be thinking about it the week before a tournament! It’s madness, like! When you think about it, it is madness.

“I try to stay as positive as I can, but it helps being surrounded by this team as well. If you have negative people around you, you’ll only get negative.

“We’re lucky enough in that our team is very positive, we all have a bit of craic. It’s a very young team, as well. We all relate to the same things, to each other. It’s handy that way, like.”

He describes it as “still a bit mad” when IABA High Performance Director Bernard Dunne reminds him that he’s now one of the senior members of the Irish team — “it just feels weird him saying that, like! I still feel about 17 on that team” — but it has been a transition accelerated by the post-Rio 2016 exodus.

He remains close with his predecessor at 56kg, Michael Conlan, whose shoes may be impossible to fill; Conlan, now a high-end professional prospect, is one of only three Irish fighters ever to win World gold along with Katie Taylor and Kellie Harrington, and is among the most decorated amateurs ever to have hailed from these shores.

Still, Conlan — whose father John trains Walker within the High Performance setup — isn’t shy in encouraging his younger pal and former understudy behind the scenes. And he’s not the only one from the old guard keeping a keen eye on the EU champion’s development.

Says Walker:

Mick Conlan and I were talking about tactics the whole week coming up to the McGrail fight — he’d text me every day. Sean McComb as well — we’d all just talk among ourselves. We’d discuss what to do, what not to do, and we’d all come up with pretty much the same tactics by the end of it, so it seemed to be working, anyway!

“Mick was telling me to take it one fight at a time, of course, but all we were thinking about, really, was McGrail in the final — we knew he was on the other side of the draw. But I would have talked to Mick, and Sean as well, on the same days, even ahead of the quarters and semis as well. I would have spoken to them before every fight.

“We were a close group, like.”

Michael Conlan remains close with former team-mate Walker, and text him every day during the EU Championships. Presseye / Jonathan Porter/INPHO Presseye / Jonathan Porter/INPHO / Jonathan Porter/INPHO

The new group are fairly tight-knit, too, and Walker believes they’re closer to Irish amateur boxing’s consensus ‘Golden Generation’ than they’ve been given credit for, their achievements to date perhaps drowned out by IABA fallouts and the aftershocks of Rio.

“It’s class, like,” he says of the current setup.

We’ve actually got some team coming up — I’m not sure if people realise it. The team is getting better every year. I think over the last couple of years, we were almost in a development stage, but everyone is going for the golds now.

“I think this could be a special team in its own right. There are even young kids coming through — 18, 19 — who are class. And it took me two or three years, so in two or three years, these guys will be seriously ready to go, hopefully.

“I was training with the Seniors when I had just turned 16, as well, so it has been ages. Even as a Youth, Tuesday to Friday, I was going to school one week, then training down there in Dublin the next week. It’s mad to think back on it, like.

“But the future for this team is bright, definitely. You see it with Kellie, Joe Ward, and myself now as well. I think this team could achieve great things.”

Walker believes Ireland's new boxing crop can at least partially replicate its predecessors' success. Tommy Dickson / INPHO Tommy Dickson / INPHO / INPHO

As for his own future, Walker doesn’t intend to get carried away by his recent triumph. The road ahead is winding and bump-laden, and there are few certainties in a sport where dreams can be ended at the push of a button.

At the same time, there’s no harm in getting a bit excited — it beats being burdened by self-doubt, at least.

“I do try and think about it one step at a time”, he says, “so I’m just thinking about qualifying for Tokyo first.

But once I qualify — and I know now that I can — I’m just going to be thinking about gold straight after that. I won’t even consider another medal. There’s no point. It’ll be straight for gold, like.

Subscribe to our new podcast, Heineken Rugby Weekly on The42, here:

‘I knew I was likely to lose’: Wahlstrom salutes ‘phenomenal’ Taylor in candid statement