PRESENT TENSE:SO, KATIE TAYLOR will get her chance to fight in the 2012 Olympics. Congratulations to her. This will be her moment. From this week she begins the long road to London, three years to train, prepare, cope with the pressure, and then, on that pivotal day, to disappoint the entire nation in some truly spectacular way that we can only guess at right now.
There is a general assumption that Taylor will pulverise all comers en route to certain Olympic gold. That she’ll throw a couple of punches and have us out of our seats punching the air in victory before the “O” in the first “Olé”. Marty Morrissey and a camera crew are already camped outside her parent’s house. Martin Cullen has the government jet reserved. He said on Thursday: “I have every confidence that in 2012 she will add an Olympic Gold to her cache.” So, no pressure Katie. Just do your best. As long as your best brings home a medal. Any medal. As long as it’s gold. We’re proud of you. Don’t screw up.
Off she goes on the long road to fame, adulation and ultimate heartbreak. There will be media interviews, sponsorship deals, regular PR shoots in which she’ll be pictured raising a gloved fist to high cheese prices or some such thing. There will be a minor row over whether she should be doing something like a “liposuction for schoolkids” promotion with a major supermarket chain.
When the time comes, there will be build-up fights where she struggles to put away a couple of flabby nobodies. But that anxiety will be described as part of the preparation, an opportunity to learn – if really bad, a "wake-up call". She'll go on the Late Late Showfor a big farewell, where she'll be told that the nation looks forward to her coming home with gold. When Ryan Tubridy says this, his breezy manner will disguise a trace of menace.
In the hope of some cheap publicity, the under-siege taoiseach, Willie O’Dea, will go to the airport to see her off. Taylor will greet him with an awkward sense of duty, but O’Dea will say he’s looking forward to her coming home with gold. His moustache will twitch in way that suggests she’d better not come home empty handed.
And off she’ll go, carrying the nation’s hopes, goodwill and crushing expectation. She’ll get through the early rounds, the nation watching with anxiety and an almost cultish faith in every word TV pundit Mick Dowling says. Then her medal fight will come. And it is now that Irish sport will perform its familiar party trick.
Expectation will collide not just with reality, but some kind of surreality in which the most bizarre circumstances will conspire to rob her, and the nation, of a moment of glory. Perhaps she won’t emerge from her dressing room. Or she’ll win by knockout, only to be disqualified after it’s discovered that her boxing gloves had been coated with an anaesthetic. Who knows what it will be, but no doubt it will be really spectacular. And once the nation has composed itself, and Bill O’Herlihy has conducted a 16-hour post-mortem with a dumb-founded panel, we will gather together around our TVs and computer screens, on bus seats and pub stools, and will sensitively concoct some hysterical rumours about how it all happened. And then, if we’re lucky, there will be a mysterious break-in and it will be time to break the emergency glass that releases Charlie Bird.
Katie Taylor will return home. And after the fuss has died down, and she’s allowed out of hiding, and the public stops treating her with a superficial sympathy that barely hides the crushing sense of disappointment, she might give it another go. There’ll be a false dawn or two, and maybe a last brave attempt at glory in 2016, ending with a first round defeat by an Andorran 16-year-old.
Although by then, the cavalcade will have moved on, focusing our national disappointment instead on the failure of the 2014 World Cup squad to recover from Stephen Ireland’s return to international football on the morning of the first group game.
But, you know, we really shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. The Olympics are three years away still. Plenty of time to enjoy the build-up, Katie. No pressure.
