A THIEF HAS just been spotted on the streets of Manchester.
He’s fleeing the scene after stealing a phone from a woman who was distracted by her screen, mid-scroll. The suspect is proceeding quickly on foot and has caught the attention of Irish boxing coach Paddy Sharkey who has just emerged from an underground car park with two of his fighters.
They’re over from Roscommon to compete in the Manchester Box Cup. But now they’re witnesses to a crime and they can’t just stand by and do nothing.
“We’ll catch him,” Paddy says, turning to sisters Aoife and Lisa O’Rourke who fight out of the Castlerea club. Paddy leads, and they follow.
A scene from an action movie unfolds as the chase begins. They slip in and out through walls and gaps, tracking the perpetrator’s movements for about a mile and a half.
There’s no way of knowing if the suspect is armed, but they follow anyway. And now they’re closing in.
“We kept after him,” Paddy says, giving his account of events. “He didn’t know what was going to happen. Two big girls and a small fella after him. Imagine him looking back [at us].”
Realising he’s surrounded, the robber gives up, throws the phone on the ground and disappears again; this time, for good. The screen survives the fall with just a crack left behind as the Roscommon trio begin the search for the owner. They eventually find her in a nearby hotel.
“She was so thankful,” says Lisa, the younger sister of Aoife and baby of the five O’Rourke sisters. “She’d just sold her house, and there was bank details and everything on the phone.”
Lisa O'Rourke [left] and Aoife at the Castlerea Boxing Club. Liam Reynolds
Liam Reynolds
****
Another episode from the adventures of Paddy, Lisa and Aoife. This time, it’s Halloween night in 2017 or 2018, around the same time they were keeping law and order on the streets of Manchester.
They’re on the way home from a sparring session in Mayo, passing through the town of Ballinagare, not far from their home in Castlerea. They travel a lot for their sport. They have to. Paddy drives the girls all over the country to spar boxers within their weight category.
On one occasion, they did two sessions back-to-back on opposite sides of the country. The first session was in Dublin. And when it was over, they turned the car towards the direction of Connemara for the second bout of training. Paddy didn’t realise both sessions were falling on the same day, but the O’Rourkes weren’t deterred by the long journey. The drives never seem too long with Paddy behind the wheel.
“He’d have the songs on,” Aoife laughs. “He’d sing the way out. He’d be telling us stories.”
This particular drive back from Mayo was just another one of those return journeys from a sparring workout. Only this time, Paddy wanted to observe a time-honoured Halloween tradition as they passed by a neighbour’s house.
“I said, ‘We’ll go in and bang at the door [for] Halloween night,’” Paddy says, filling in the gaps of the story. “It’s a big, long drive into the house.
“Aoife jumped out, nearly broke the door and we drove off. Skits of laughing at 11 o’clock.
“We always had a bit of craic.”
****
It’s an October night in 2025, and the O’Rourke girls are back in Castlerea Boxing Club. Back to where it all began. Olympic appearances, success on the European and World stage – it was all mined here inside the walls of this wonderful facility.
They were in here recently for a homecoming after their respective runs at the World Boxing Championships in Liverpool where Aoife won gold in the women’s 75kg division.
As they walk through the door, a local photographer offers them a familiar greeting. It’s not the first time he has pointed the lens at them throughout their journey to becoming ambassadors for Roscommon, and world champion boxers. He knows them outside the ring too.
Aoife and Lisa O'Rourke pictured in front of a beautiful mural of them in Castlerea. Liam Reynolds
Liam Reynolds
The walls of the boxing hall are stacked with pictures and murals of the pair to provide useful backdrops for the photos. The girls have been instructed to bring their gold medals with them for the snaps.
While the photographer keeps them busy with getting the lighting right and sorting the angles for the poses, Paddy is on the other side of the hall, preparing for a tournament later that evening, packing boxing uniforms into a bag for the younger members of the club.
He has time for a chat before heading off, and throws some chairs into the ring. As the photoshoot continues, he bounces around the boxing hall, throwing a few jabs into a punching bag. Sharkey would like a picture of the sisters too. There’s still some room up there on the walls to pack in a little more appreciation for two brilliant products from the club.
Once the photos are squared away, it’s time to climb through the ropes and reflect on a brilliant story in Irish boxing that has many chapters yet to be written.
“Everyone that comes through the door,” Sharkey begins, “you think they’re going to be great. [They] could be gone the week after. But they were great from the start, these two girls.
“There was just something different about them. Their ability to train, their ability to focus. You just couldn’t knock these two girls.”
****
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Let’s start with Lisa, and what she thought when her older sister Aoife first started lacing up the gloves.
“I’ll never do that,” she would say. Boxing would not be for her.
Aoife grins when she thinks about her sibling’s disinterested reaction. She was 16 when she first started boxing in 2013, taking it up as a way to get fit for Gaelic football. The club was only about two years old at that point.
And when she first stepped into the ring, her nervousness manifested as uncontrollable laughter.
“You’d be sparring whoever, and it was just all fun,” she explains. “It was very hard to take it serious, and not get it in [the ring] without laughing.
“And when you had Paddy roaring at you, it was all very new to me. It was completely different to a football coach roaring at you.”
A reaction like that isn’t all that surprising. Boxing was a total departure from what Aoife was used to in Gaelic football. But she adapted and was quickly drawn in by what this new sport was giving her.
The training was difficult, as every first-timer discovers when they come to their first session in Castlerea. Aoife got a rattle too in her initiation. She joined the Castlerea Boxing Club with some friends, but she wanted the company of her sister Lisa at the training too.
“Aoife kept coaxing me,” Lisa continues.
“I came in and remember I was real nervous. We’d be walking down to the counter to sign in the book. I remember seeing Paddy standing there and he saw me coming in with her. I was probably as red as could be, all mortified.
”But you just get into the flow of it and I was lucky to have her, following everything she done. And the next thing it’s like, ‘Here you are 10 years later.’ It’s crazy when you think how long we’ve been doing it.”
****
Growing up in an all-sister household was everything you might expect for Aoife and Lisa. Aoife was third in line behind the eldest, Aisling, and Áine. Ailish, who was also an accomplished boxer, comes next, followed by Lisa.
“That’s mine.”
“Where’s my clothes?”
“She’s wearing my top”
“You took my bra…”
The typical soundtrack of sisters trying to grow up together.
Their father Kevin is a beef and sheep farmer and, of his five daughters, Lisa and Aoife were the ones who were ever-presents around the yard to do the jobs. Aoife even briefly considered becoming a vet, but that’s obviously been shelved to concentrate on a career in high performance sport.
“I think we’re more outgoing than I suppose the three older [sisters],” says Lisa. “They would go if [they] were asked but we were just, I suppose, [we were] always out and about with them and loved the enjoyment with the animals and that kept us happy.”
Like other children, Lisa and Aoife tried several sports to begin with. Along with Gaelic football — which Lisa still continues to play — there was also some basketball, while Aoife was a passionate Irish dancer. Her mother Ann brought her to the competitions and would happily sit through a feis.
Aoife's hand is raised after winning the quarter-final of the IBA Women's World Boxing Championships in Nis, Serbia. Aleksandar Djorovic / INPHO
Aleksandar Djorovic / INPHO / INPHO
“Her head must have been pounding,” says Aoife with a nod to her mother’s commitment despite the noise levels of the music.
Aoife and Lisa are heading down the same path together now. They’ve even taken up Hyrox, and conquered the world while doing it. In June, they won the Hyrox Pro Women’s Doubles at the World Championships in Chicago. Similar to how boxing entered their lives, Aoife was the first to get involved in Hyrox events, and Lisa followed.
“We’re so similar in ways,” says Lisa, “that we know when we’re in that competitiveness mode, I’m able to give out to her, she’s able to give out to me, because we know each other’s strengths, and we know when there’s an extra gear to push ourselves. And it’s just nice to do something together.”
When they travel for boxing tournaments, they’re always by each other’s side. Their only real time apart is when they get into the ring to fight. And while they enjoy travelling the world for their sport, they both gravitate to home in Roscommon.
These days, they travel up to Dublin midweek for training in the High Performance Unit. And even though they don’t share the same accommodation, they can read each other’s minds from a distance.
“It happens every day,” Aoife says, her eyes widening as she elaborates on the telepathy between them. “Too much. It’s like one of us is always that half-step ahead. It’s so weird. She’d say something and I’d already be doing what she’s asking me.”
Being fluent in one another’s code is equally amazing to Lisa. Particularly when it isn’t intentional.
“Even [with] clothes. Sometimes we’ll end up wearing the exact same outfit. And we don’t live in the same house. It wouldn’t be planned.
“Next thing, we’ll land and she’ll be like, ‘You go home and change. I’m not changing.’”
Siblings competing in high level sport concurrently always dredges up questions about the existence of a rivalry. That’s not the case for Aoife and Lisa. They feed off each other’s energy, and one sister’s achievement prompts a sincere drive to chase similar feats in the other sibling.
“It’s definitely not like, ’Oh, she won that, I’m jealous,’” Aoife adds. “It’s just like, ’Wow, that is incredible, I want to push on and try and achieve the same thing.’ It motivates you, but it’s not like a badness motivation. [It's] a role model to look at.
“When you see somebody achieve something, they’re a human too. Why can’t you go and do it?”
****
For Sharkey, the potential for success was obvious in the two O’Rourkes from early doors. Once he knew they could withstand his difficult training regime and still want more of it, he was confident that a big future lay before them.
Lisa O'Rourke receiving advice in the corner during her Light-Middleweight Final at the World Championships in Serbia. Aleksandar Djorovic / INPHO
Aleksandar Djorovic / INPHO / INPHO
“I’d say we were both ready to cry,” Lisa says, recalling the first time they fought competitively. “We’re getting in this square here to try and hit someone and see who can hit the most. This is bizarre.”
Aoife started to believe when the doors to the National Stadium opened up for her. It took a few tries, but she became an Irish champion at the third attempt. She’s now a four-time European gold medallist who has competed at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics. This year, she won a world silver medal in Serbia in March before gold followed at Liverpool in September.
Lisa has yet to get the five Olympic rings on her chest but she has plenty of hardware too. She became a world champion in 2022 at just 20 years of age, defeating Mozambique’s Alcinda Panguane in the light-middleweight (70kg) class via a 4-1 split decision. That was a historic moment in Istanbul as Amy Broadhurst also claimed top honours in the light-welterweight (63kg) decider to expand Ireland’s list of World Boxing Championship gold medal winners to five. The pair were now breathing rarified air alongside Katie Taylor, Michael Conlan and Kellie Harrington.
But the O’Rourkes don’t judge their careers by the glow coming from the cabinet. Medals are nice rewards but their passion for boxing has roots that go deeper. It’s a mentality that has been evident in their game since they first began stepping into the ring. Learning how to lose has helped them manage their reaction to winning too.
Aoife didn’t come home from either of her Olympic campaigns with a medal, and her exit in Paris triggered a huge reaction of disappointment at home. People felt she was wronged by the split decision against Poland’s Elzbieta Wojcik in the Women’s 75kg.
“People do ask me about Paris and I’m like, ‘Forget about it,’” says Aoife. “I sound like a broken record, but actually people sound like a broken record, [they] keep going on about it. I don’t actually care. It’s over and there’s nothing I can do.
“It’s not the end of the world [if you lose]. It was just come home from the competition and, ‘We’ll see you for training on Monday.’” It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m down in the dumps now for the next six months. I might go back next year.’ Just [go] back at it.”
Reflecting back to her gold medal success in Liverpool recently, Aoife adds:
“I came home with gold this time, she [Lisa] came home with gold a few years ago. And in that moment, it’s like, ‘God, I feel useless.’ I’m the one landing home empty-handed. But what people forget is, they only see the medals. There’s so much more to success than just a medal.
“It’s like, if I don’t bring home a medal, they’re like, ‘Oh, you didn’t win this time.’ But I actually won in so many other ways. I controlled my warm-up better, my nerves before a fight. All of that is success to the bigger picture. It’s not just about a medal and that’s what everyone sees. Success can sometimes be actually just getting to the competition fit, healthy and in a good headspace.
“The difference in coming home with a gold medal and coming home with a silver medal in the same year, only a few months apart, is next to none. That world silver medal, to me, is one of my favourite medals of all. It probably is my number one medal. But yet, everyone thinks the gold one is amazing.”
Sharkey adds another example to illuminate their attitude to sport from when they were younger.
“We went training to a club one night and Aoife was after getting out of the ring. And Lisa got in. This particular club had good girls that were recognised in Ireland.
“And I was chatting to another coach, and this girl gave Lisa a bang.
“We were looking in over the ring, and Lisa just nearly killed her. And I said to him, ‘that’s the younger one now.’ And we weren’t invited back.”
****
The O'Rourkes in the Castlerea boxing ring. Liam Reynolds
Liam Reynolds
During that recent homecoming in Castlerea, the O’Rourke sisters made a presentation of a medal to their coach Paddy Sharkey. He didn’t know it was coming. The medal came from the silver that Aoife won in Serbia. Essentially, the medal was magnetic and could be split in half for the boxer to give to their coach.
Sharkey is already thinking of a place to showcase it on the wall of the boxing club.
“I must bring it down and I’d put it in here with one of her belts,” he says, pointing to a glass case which holds one of Aoife’s belts.
From sitting in their company, it’s clear that the O’Rourkes would live this life in any circumstance. The promise of medals isn’t what pushes them. It’s not the fame either.
It’s the feeling they get when they engage with sport. It’s the variety that Hyrox brings when they need a break from boxing. It’s the support they receive from their family and the people of Castlerea and Roscommon. It’s being on that journey together and being each other’s battery.
It’s Lisa battling back from breaking her thumb twice, and her metacarpal bone. It’s the fun and the laughter on those many drives around the country with Paddy Sharkey.
Aoife and Lisa can summarise their perspective better.
“It’s learning to take in all the moments and really take them in so that you can picture it 10 years down the line. And the feelings you had, and the people who were there.
“You have to do it for long enough to realise it, even though we’re still doing it. If you asked me about my first ever medal, I couldn’t tell you. But I could tell you the memories of going away training or the first time I had the Roscommon championships. It’s not the medals.”
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'You just couldn't knock these girls' - The rise and rise of two Roscommon sisters in the ring
A THIEF HAS just been spotted on the streets of Manchester.
He’s fleeing the scene after stealing a phone from a woman who was distracted by her screen, mid-scroll. The suspect is proceeding quickly on foot and has caught the attention of Irish boxing coach Paddy Sharkey who has just emerged from an underground car park with two of his fighters.
They’re over from Roscommon to compete in the Manchester Box Cup. But now they’re witnesses to a crime and they can’t just stand by and do nothing.
“We’ll catch him,” Paddy says, turning to sisters Aoife and Lisa O’Rourke who fight out of the Castlerea club. Paddy leads, and they follow.
A scene from an action movie unfolds as the chase begins. They slip in and out through walls and gaps, tracking the perpetrator’s movements for about a mile and a half.
There’s no way of knowing if the suspect is armed, but they follow anyway. And now they’re closing in.
“We kept after him,” Paddy says, giving his account of events. “He didn’t know what was going to happen. Two big girls and a small fella after him. Imagine him looking back [at us].”
Realising he’s surrounded, the robber gives up, throws the phone on the ground and disappears again; this time, for good. The screen survives the fall with just a crack left behind as the Roscommon trio begin the search for the owner. They eventually find her in a nearby hotel.
“She was so thankful,” says Lisa, the younger sister of Aoife and baby of the five O’Rourke sisters. “She’d just sold her house, and there was bank details and everything on the phone.”
****
Another episode from the adventures of Paddy, Lisa and Aoife. This time, it’s Halloween night in 2017 or 2018, around the same time they were keeping law and order on the streets of Manchester.
They’re on the way home from a sparring session in Mayo, passing through the town of Ballinagare, not far from their home in Castlerea. They travel a lot for their sport. They have to. Paddy drives the girls all over the country to spar boxers within their weight category.
On one occasion, they did two sessions back-to-back on opposite sides of the country. The first session was in Dublin. And when it was over, they turned the car towards the direction of Connemara for the second bout of training. Paddy didn’t realise both sessions were falling on the same day, but the O’Rourkes weren’t deterred by the long journey. The drives never seem too long with Paddy behind the wheel.
“He’d have the songs on,” Aoife laughs. “He’d sing the way out. He’d be telling us stories.”
This particular drive back from Mayo was just another one of those return journeys from a sparring workout. Only this time, Paddy wanted to observe a time-honoured Halloween tradition as they passed by a neighbour’s house.
“I said, ‘We’ll go in and bang at the door [for] Halloween night,’” Paddy says, filling in the gaps of the story. “It’s a big, long drive into the house.
“Aoife jumped out, nearly broke the door and we drove off. Skits of laughing at 11 o’clock.
“We always had a bit of craic.”
****
It’s an October night in 2025, and the O’Rourke girls are back in Castlerea Boxing Club. Back to where it all began. Olympic appearances, success on the European and World stage – it was all mined here inside the walls of this wonderful facility.
They were in here recently for a homecoming after their respective runs at the World Boxing Championships in Liverpool where Aoife won gold in the women’s 75kg division.
As they walk through the door, a local photographer offers them a familiar greeting. It’s not the first time he has pointed the lens at them throughout their journey to becoming ambassadors for Roscommon, and world champion boxers. He knows them outside the ring too.
The walls of the boxing hall are stacked with pictures and murals of the pair to provide useful backdrops for the photos. The girls have been instructed to bring their gold medals with them for the snaps.
While the photographer keeps them busy with getting the lighting right and sorting the angles for the poses, Paddy is on the other side of the hall, preparing for a tournament later that evening, packing boxing uniforms into a bag for the younger members of the club.
He has time for a chat before heading off, and throws some chairs into the ring. As the photoshoot continues, he bounces around the boxing hall, throwing a few jabs into a punching bag. Sharkey would like a picture of the sisters too. There’s still some room up there on the walls to pack in a little more appreciation for two brilliant products from the club.
Once the photos are squared away, it’s time to climb through the ropes and reflect on a brilliant story in Irish boxing that has many chapters yet to be written.
“Everyone that comes through the door,” Sharkey begins, “you think they’re going to be great. [They] could be gone the week after. But they were great from the start, these two girls.
“There was just something different about them. Their ability to train, their ability to focus. You just couldn’t knock these two girls.”
****
Let’s start with Lisa, and what she thought when her older sister Aoife first started lacing up the gloves.
“I’ll never do that,” she would say. Boxing would not be for her.
Aoife grins when she thinks about her sibling’s disinterested reaction. She was 16 when she first started boxing in 2013, taking it up as a way to get fit for Gaelic football. The club was only about two years old at that point.
And when she first stepped into the ring, her nervousness manifested as uncontrollable laughter.
“You’d be sparring whoever, and it was just all fun,” she explains. “It was very hard to take it serious, and not get it in [the ring] without laughing.
“And when you had Paddy roaring at you, it was all very new to me. It was completely different to a football coach roaring at you.”
A reaction like that isn’t all that surprising. Boxing was a total departure from what Aoife was used to in Gaelic football. But she adapted and was quickly drawn in by what this new sport was giving her.
The training was difficult, as every first-timer discovers when they come to their first session in Castlerea. Aoife got a rattle too in her initiation. She joined the Castlerea Boxing Club with some friends, but she wanted the company of her sister Lisa at the training too.
“Aoife kept coaxing me,” Lisa continues.
“I came in and remember I was real nervous. We’d be walking down to the counter to sign in the book. I remember seeing Paddy standing there and he saw me coming in with her. I was probably as red as could be, all mortified.
”But you just get into the flow of it and I was lucky to have her, following everything she done. And the next thing it’s like, ‘Here you are 10 years later.’ It’s crazy when you think how long we’ve been doing it.”
****
Growing up in an all-sister household was everything you might expect for Aoife and Lisa. Aoife was third in line behind the eldest, Aisling, and Áine. Ailish, who was also an accomplished boxer, comes next, followed by Lisa.
“That’s mine.”
“Where’s my clothes?”
“She’s wearing my top”
“You took my bra…”
The typical soundtrack of sisters trying to grow up together.
Their father Kevin is a beef and sheep farmer and, of his five daughters, Lisa and Aoife were the ones who were ever-presents around the yard to do the jobs. Aoife even briefly considered becoming a vet, but that’s obviously been shelved to concentrate on a career in high performance sport.
“I think we’re more outgoing than I suppose the three older [sisters],” says Lisa. “They would go if [they] were asked but we were just, I suppose, [we were] always out and about with them and loved the enjoyment with the animals and that kept us happy.”
Like other children, Lisa and Aoife tried several sports to begin with. Along with Gaelic football — which Lisa still continues to play — there was also some basketball, while Aoife was a passionate Irish dancer. Her mother Ann brought her to the competitions and would happily sit through a feis.
“Her head must have been pounding,” says Aoife with a nod to her mother’s commitment despite the noise levels of the music.
Aoife and Lisa are heading down the same path together now. They’ve even taken up Hyrox, and conquered the world while doing it. In June, they won the Hyrox Pro Women’s Doubles at the World Championships in Chicago. Similar to how boxing entered their lives, Aoife was the first to get involved in Hyrox events, and Lisa followed.
“We’re so similar in ways,” says Lisa, “that we know when we’re in that competitiveness mode, I’m able to give out to her, she’s able to give out to me, because we know each other’s strengths, and we know when there’s an extra gear to push ourselves. And it’s just nice to do something together.”
When they travel for boxing tournaments, they’re always by each other’s side. Their only real time apart is when they get into the ring to fight. And while they enjoy travelling the world for their sport, they both gravitate to home in Roscommon.
These days, they travel up to Dublin midweek for training in the High Performance Unit. And even though they don’t share the same accommodation, they can read each other’s minds from a distance.
“It happens every day,” Aoife says, her eyes widening as she elaborates on the telepathy between them. “Too much. It’s like one of us is always that half-step ahead. It’s so weird. She’d say something and I’d already be doing what she’s asking me.”
Being fluent in one another’s code is equally amazing to Lisa. Particularly when it isn’t intentional.
“Even [with] clothes. Sometimes we’ll end up wearing the exact same outfit. And we don’t live in the same house. It wouldn’t be planned.
“Next thing, we’ll land and she’ll be like, ‘You go home and change. I’m not changing.’”
Siblings competing in high level sport concurrently always dredges up questions about the existence of a rivalry. That’s not the case for Aoife and Lisa. They feed off each other’s energy, and one sister’s achievement prompts a sincere drive to chase similar feats in the other sibling.
“It’s definitely not like, ’Oh, she won that, I’m jealous,’” Aoife adds. “It’s just like, ’Wow, that is incredible, I want to push on and try and achieve the same thing.’ It motivates you, but it’s not like a badness motivation. [It's] a role model to look at.
“When you see somebody achieve something, they’re a human too. Why can’t you go and do it?”
****
For Sharkey, the potential for success was obvious in the two O’Rourkes from early doors. Once he knew they could withstand his difficult training regime and still want more of it, he was confident that a big future lay before them.
“I’d say we were both ready to cry,” Lisa says, recalling the first time they fought competitively. “We’re getting in this square here to try and hit someone and see who can hit the most. This is bizarre.”
Aoife started to believe when the doors to the National Stadium opened up for her. It took a few tries, but she became an Irish champion at the third attempt. She’s now a four-time European gold medallist who has competed at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics. This year, she won a world silver medal in Serbia in March before gold followed at Liverpool in September.
Lisa has yet to get the five Olympic rings on her chest but she has plenty of hardware too. She became a world champion in 2022 at just 20 years of age, defeating Mozambique’s Alcinda Panguane in the light-middleweight (70kg) class via a 4-1 split decision. That was a historic moment in Istanbul as Amy Broadhurst also claimed top honours in the light-welterweight (63kg) decider to expand Ireland’s list of World Boxing Championship gold medal winners to five. The pair were now breathing rarified air alongside Katie Taylor, Michael Conlan and Kellie Harrington.
But the O’Rourkes don’t judge their careers by the glow coming from the cabinet. Medals are nice rewards but their passion for boxing has roots that go deeper. It’s a mentality that has been evident in their game since they first began stepping into the ring. Learning how to lose has helped them manage their reaction to winning too.
Aoife didn’t come home from either of her Olympic campaigns with a medal, and her exit in Paris triggered a huge reaction of disappointment at home. People felt she was wronged by the split decision against Poland’s Elzbieta Wojcik in the Women’s 75kg.
“People do ask me about Paris and I’m like, ‘Forget about it,’” says Aoife. “I sound like a broken record, but actually people sound like a broken record, [they] keep going on about it. I don’t actually care. It’s over and there’s nothing I can do.
“It’s not the end of the world [if you lose]. It was just come home from the competition and, ‘We’ll see you for training on Monday.’” It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m down in the dumps now for the next six months. I might go back next year.’ Just [go] back at it.”
Reflecting back to her gold medal success in Liverpool recently, Aoife adds:
“I came home with gold this time, she [Lisa] came home with gold a few years ago. And in that moment, it’s like, ‘God, I feel useless.’ I’m the one landing home empty-handed. But what people forget is, they only see the medals. There’s so much more to success than just a medal.
“It’s like, if I don’t bring home a medal, they’re like, ‘Oh, you didn’t win this time.’ But I actually won in so many other ways. I controlled my warm-up better, my nerves before a fight. All of that is success to the bigger picture. It’s not just about a medal and that’s what everyone sees. Success can sometimes be actually just getting to the competition fit, healthy and in a good headspace.
“The difference in coming home with a gold medal and coming home with a silver medal in the same year, only a few months apart, is next to none. That world silver medal, to me, is one of my favourite medals of all. It probably is my number one medal. But yet, everyone thinks the gold one is amazing.”
Sharkey adds another example to illuminate their attitude to sport from when they were younger.
“We went training to a club one night and Aoife was after getting out of the ring. And Lisa got in. This particular club had good girls that were recognised in Ireland.
“And I was chatting to another coach, and this girl gave Lisa a bang.
“We were looking in over the ring, and Lisa just nearly killed her. And I said to him, ‘that’s the younger one now.’ And we weren’t invited back.”
****
During that recent homecoming in Castlerea, the O’Rourke sisters made a presentation of a medal to their coach Paddy Sharkey. He didn’t know it was coming. The medal came from the silver that Aoife won in Serbia. Essentially, the medal was magnetic and could be split in half for the boxer to give to their coach.
Sharkey is already thinking of a place to showcase it on the wall of the boxing club.
“I must bring it down and I’d put it in here with one of her belts,” he says, pointing to a glass case which holds one of Aoife’s belts.
From sitting in their company, it’s clear that the O’Rourkes would live this life in any circumstance. The promise of medals isn’t what pushes them. It’s not the fame either.
It’s the feeling they get when they engage with sport. It’s the variety that Hyrox brings when they need a break from boxing. It’s the support they receive from their family and the people of Castlerea and Roscommon. It’s being on that journey together and being each other’s battery.
It’s Lisa battling back from breaking her thumb twice, and her metacarpal bone. It’s the fun and the laughter on those many drives around the country with Paddy Sharkey.
Aoife and Lisa can summarise their perspective better.
“It’s learning to take in all the moments and really take them in so that you can picture it 10 years down the line. And the feelings you had, and the people who were there.
“You have to do it for long enough to realise it, even though we’re still doing it. If you asked me about my first ever medal, I couldn’t tell you. But I could tell you the memories of going away training or the first time I had the Roscommon championships. It’s not the medals.”
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Aoife O'Rourke Boxing Castlerea Boxing Club lisa o'rourke The Climb