Irish boxer Rachel Lally is set to face South African Wendy Gcado in Dubai on Saturday.
Should the 30-year-old win the fight, she will break into the top five of the female super middleweight rankings less than a year after combining professional boxing with her career as a teacher in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
From Co Mayo, Lally took-up the sport in the lead up to the 2012 London Olympics. The Irish team went on to win four boxing medals at those games, with Katie Taylor’s gold sparking a surge in interest among girls and women.
“Women’s boxing was really coming up,” says Lally, who trained at the Golden Gloves Club in her hometown of Belmullet.
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She was “in a tough place physically and mentally” when she started out and was “unhappy in my body”, but a year of boxing marked a turnaround for Lally.
At 17 she became an under-18 national champion, with several girls from her home club also winning titles.
Lally had been due to fight for the same title in the National Stadium in Dublin the previous year, but pulled out after learning a close friend had died by suicide the day before the bout. Within an 18-month period, she lost three teenage friends in Co Mayo to suicide.
“It was just a really horrible time because we had absolutely no mental health facilities,” she says. Boxing became an important outlet for her as she coped with those tragedies.
However, the Leaving Certificate, followed by college and then a heavy caseload as a teacher in London, left Lally with little time to box after earning her junior title.
“I just wasn’t prioritising my health at all,” she said.
After moving to Dubai to work as a teacher in 2021 and joining a local boxing gym, a coach encouraged her to take part in amateur fights including an event for St Patrick’s Day alongside other Irish boxers.
Lally says the calibre of training facilities in Dubai is higher than in Ireland but they are much more expensive to access.
“I paid €2 a night to train [in Mayo] with people volunteering their time,” she says, adding that it is difficult “to keep gyms open in small towns and there could be 20 kids in a tiny little room”.
In Dubai Lally is “training with professional guys, sparring two or three times a week and people come from all over the Emirates” to the gym.
However, she says fighters “can only reach a certain level without individual sponsorship”. The construction firm Rinrow, Capital Sky Limited and meal prep company, Meals On Me, have helped fund the cost of Lally’s training camp before her fight on Saturday.
In the lead up to her bout against Gcado, Lally has been doing 4am jogs before starting work as a teacher and then undertaking a gruelling after-work regime of sparring, strength training and one-to-one coaching sessions.
“That means no days off,” she says.
Lally says that when she faced Elene Sikmashvili from Georgia and Cameroon’s Marie Victorine Onguene Tsimi in professional fights, theirs were the only female bouts on the card.
“All my last bouts have been very tough, there hasn’t been an easy fight,” she says. “But I’m 30 now, I don’t have time to do fights that aren’t really challenging for me.”
When she eventually hangs up her boxing gloves, Lally hopes to work with a programme that empowers girls and helps with their mental health through boxing.
