Katie Taylor’s been fighting for all of her adult life and a large part of her childhood. She had to fight for the right to compete in Ireland and then again for the right to compete at the Olympics. She’s succeeded against enormous odds and continues to set an amazing example to others at an incredibly difficult time for Irish boxing, making her not just a national hero but a True Superhero to boot. 

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K Taylor causing uproar

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Taylor was born in 1986 in Bray, a coastal town just 12 miles south of Dublin. The Taylor family were poor, as Katie told The Guardian: “We wouldn’t have had a lot of money growing up. We were a very, very poor family living in the roughest area but God chose our family and did something with us. I have two brothers and one sister and we all became successful. But nobody would have looked at our family or our house and thought: ‘Success will come to them.’” 

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One thing the Taylors did have was boxing. Her mother, Bridget, was the first female boxing judge in Ireland and in the year Katie was born her father, Pete, became the national light heavyweight champion. Ten years later he opened a boxing club in Bray that would prove pivotal in his daughter’s early career. Katie would go to the gym with her father and two brothers and desperately wanted to be involved in the ring, but there was no option for a girl to get involved in boxing in ‘90s Ireland as women’s boxing was prohibited at all ages and there was nobody for her to fight.

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The family’s solution was simple but effective. As Taylor later said, “I had to pretend I was a boy to get fights. We had to put my name down just as K Taylor. I would pull the headgear on, tuck my hair inside so no one could see it, and get into the ring that way. When I won and took the headgear off there would be uproar when everyone suddenly saw I was a girl.“ Katie won a lot of fights and caused a lot of uproar.

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The reluctant hero scales the Olympian heights 

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The law on women’s boxing in Ireland changed in 1997, but due to the reluctance of boxing authorities there would not be an officially sanctioned women’s contest in Ireland until 2001. When the time finally came for the historic first bout, it was obvious that the young prodigy from Bray should be involved. Taylor’s opponent was another promising teenager, Northern Ireland’s Alanna Nihell, with the fight taking place at Dublin’s National Stadium, a 2000-seater purpose-built boxing arena. Katie later recalled the enormous pressure of the fight, saying in 2019: “I was quite aware it was a history-making fight because of the attention it was getting in the media beforehand and afterward. I remember being quite nervous on the day because I realized how huge it actually was.” Two years later, she told The Guardian: “The hardest part was the media interest. I was very shy and I hated it. It was a bit much for a girl of 15.” 

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Taylor won the contest on points and went on to dominate women’s amateur boxing. She lifted her first gold medal in 2005, winning the lightweight division at the European Championships in Tønsberg, Norway and the following year she became world champion at the same weight in New Delhi. She would go on to win a total of six World and five European championships but as she racked up the medals she became involved in a different fight, battling with the  International Olympic Committee (IOC) to have women’s boxing recognised as an Olympic event.

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Taylor had been involved in the lobbying of the IOC to have women’s boxing in the Beijing Games of 2008, putting on exhibition fights in places as far afield as Chicago and St. Petersburg but the campaign narrowly failed. She redoubled her efforts for London 2012 with the Amateur International Boxing Association using her as the figurehead of their campaign. In 2009, the IOC finally relented and three years later the intensely private and shy Taylor fought her toughest and most public battle yet, carrying the hopes of an entire nation as she went on to become Ireland’s first Olympic gold medallist - in any sport - since 1996.

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A one-armed champion

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Taylor’s celebrity continued to grow as she tightened her grip on the lightweight division, winning another European and World Championship in 2014, but her preparations for defending her Olympic title in Rio in 2016 were derailed after it emerged that her father was having an affair. The ensuing divorce greatly affected Katie, and she severed ties with her father who, until that point, had been her trainer throughout her career. Katie later revealed: "The first time I had to go training without him, I was driving in by myself and the tears were rolling down my face. I just felt like every time I was stepping into the ring without my dad at that time, I was missing an arm."

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Understandably, her boxing suffered. She experienced her first-ever defeat at the World Championships in 2016, losing a semi-final bout, and would go on to suffer a controversial quarter-final defeat in Rio - although there has been doubt placed on the validity of that result, with allegations of widespread corruption leveled at boxing officials. This would be the end of her amateur reign and the low point of her career. 

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The True Superhero of Irish boxing

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Three months after defeat in Rio, Katie turned professional and it took her less than a year to become a world champion again, claiming the WBA belt from reigning champion Anahí Ester Sánchez. By June of 2019 she had unified all four major world championship belts, claiming the title of undisputed lightweight champion of the world by defeating the formidable Belgian Delfine Persoon. She has gone on to defend that title seven times - putting her ahead of the likes of George Foreman, Joe Frazier, Floyd Mayweather Jr., and Lennox Lewis in the list of most unified title defenses in a professional career that has seen her win 21 straight bouts. Many of these fights took place on undercards, away from the limelight, but that cannot be said of her 2022 title defense, widely regarded as the biggest fight of the year for men or women. 

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In April, Taylor fought the extraordinary Puerto Rican boxer Amanda Serrano, herself a world record holder for having won world titles at seven different weights. The hugely anticipated fight, billed simply as ‘For History’, was the first-ever women’s boxing match to top the bill at Madison Square Garden. The ticket revenue of $1.45m was the highest for any event at the Garden since the end of the Covid-19 epidemic, and the worldwide audience of 1.5m people smashed all previous box-office records for a woman’s fight. This wasn’t just a landmark for women’s boxing, but has been widely hailed as the most prestigious fight of 2022. Katie’s narrow victory over Serrano meant that she was recognized as the best pound-for-pound female fighter in the world. 

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Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Katie’s achievements is that they have taken place at a time of great difficulty for Irish boxing. For the last several years, the sport has been rocked by ongoing violence associated with a bloody feud between Dublin’s organized crime gangs. Since 2015,  18 people have died in this feud, many of whom had close ties to the Irish boxing community and, as a consequence, there have been no large-scale boxing contests in Ireland for several years. 

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Taylor stands apart from this gruesome war as a wholesome symbol of sporting and ethical excellence, supplementing her incredible successes in the ring with her work acting as an ambassador for children’s hospitals, hospices, and social clubs for disabled people in and around Bray, and also supporting international children’s charities like Zest4Kidz in their work worldwide. She hopes to be able to box in her native Ireland again one day, but until that becomes possible her legions of Irish fans will happily travel with her wherever she goes.

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