Kellie Harrington is on the brink of winning her second Olympic gold medal in boxing, as she prepares to face China’s Wenlu Yang in tonight's final.
With a silver medal at least already secured, and gold from the 2020 Olympics safely hanging in the trophy cabinet, Harrington's legacy is already cemented in the eyes of Irish people.
The silky southpaw will go down as one the greatest ever Olympians to ever represent the country, regardless of what happens tonight, although the Dubliner will certainly be eyeing up gold.
Like all of the best sports people in the world though, Harrington was once a raw novice in her chosen trade, and although it is hard to believe given what she has gone on to succeed, but the Irish hero actually lost her first ever fight.
A troubled youngster growing up in inner-city Dublin, the future champion begged her local boxing club to let her join, but they didn't accept female fighters.
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After lots of pleading and negotiating, Harrington finally found herself in the ring, wearing gloves, headgear and ready to go to war, but she couldn't escape the feeling that she was being hung out to dry.
As she revealed in her autobiography Kellie, the first time that the future two-time Olympic champion had an actual fight, it didn't go to plan.
So I’m in the ring, my first fight ever. My nerves are absolutely gone. I hit the girl, Caroline O’Reilly, and I go, ‘Oh – sorry, sorry!’ And she was a brute. I was like, ‘Oh my God—!’ She hit me real hard.
I’ll never forget it – she milled me out of it. I was trying to give it back; I was trying to box. There were three rounds in the fight, two minutes each round. In the last round, with about ten seconds to go, the referee stopped the fight, because I was getting battered.
He could have stopped it earlier and declared her the winner, but he let it go on and then he stopped it ten seconds before the end. That was the worst bit. It was a stoppage. I was raging. I cried the whole way home. There were people on the bus, excited and happy because they’d won and they had their little trophies, but I wasn’t in any mood to be smiling.
I remember sitting there, sniffling, with the tears running down my face. I was sitting beside Debbie. ‘I’m going to fight her again.’ ‘Yeah, yeah – you will an’ all.’ ‘I’m going to come back and beat her.’
I thought I knew why I’d been put into that situation – the reason why some of the men in the boxing club had put me in against a girl with much more experience: ‘We’ll get rid of her now.’ It was never said, but that was what I felt. They were testing me. ‘We’ll see – does she really want it or not.’
It's safe to say that they didn't get rid of her, and what Harrington has went on to achieve since has been nothing short of incredible.
That journey still isn't over though as there is at least one more chapter left to be written in tonight's final, but when you consider that no matter what, she will be standing on the podium tonight, and you compare that to the little girl who was crying on the bus home after her first fight, it really is the stuff of dreams.
