Right to the very end of the year, Kellie Harrington still had them out of their seats – this time after she was named Irish Times/Sport Ireland Sportswoman of the Year for 2024.
When Ciara Mageean walked up to accept her monthly award an hour earlier, Harrington roared from the table, ‘Go Ciara.’ Game recognising game.
But who has had more game than Harrington in 2024? When she was announced as the overall winner those in the function room of The Shelbourne Hotel rose simultaneously.
Mageean, Mona McSharry, Sonia O’Sullivan, the great and the good. All spontaneously out of their chairs. Harrington is adjusting to life as a former boxer these days, but double Olympic champions don’t bow out unnoticed.
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In the lobby afterwards, one of the first people over for a photo was Rhasidat Adeleke’s mam, Adewumi Ademola. They enveloped each other in a long, warm embrace beforehand. Others followed. Her achievements in Tokyo and Paris have set her apart. This is who Harrington is now, and forever will be, the Irish boxer who retained her Olympic gold medal. Unprecedented stuff.
The Team of the Year award was won by Paralympic cyclists Katie-George Dunlevy, Linda Kelly and Eve McCrystal.
For Harrington, it has been a challenge adjusting to life outside the bubble of being an athlete.
“Part of that is probably because I am usually so focused on what’s next,” she said.
“And now I just don’t know, I’m in limbo land – I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know who I am, I don’t know anything. I’m just taking the rest of this year off to enjoy doing nothing, and it feels so strange.
“It really feels so strange to not have to get up and go training, not to have to check my weight every morning, not to try and think of what things I want to work on in training.
“I would be constantly always thinking about stuff like that, thinking about how I can get better, what’s that one per cent that I can work on today. But now it’s like, ‘What am I going to have for my breakfast today – will I have porridge or will I have a fry?’ I definitely miss it.”
But to help with the transition, she has kept her eye in – popping out to Abbottstown to train in the high-performance unit.
Zaur Anita has even suggested she join the team when they travel to China in February, to help prepare the boxers with some sparring. She might. But there is no grá within her to become a coach.
“I don’t think that’s me. I think if I was to go to a coaching role I’d probably lose my cool. But I do think there is something there that I have to give back, but I just don’t think it’s in a coaching role, not to the extent that is in the high performance.”
She recently moved back to Portland Row with her wife Mandy, buying a house just a quick shuffle away from Harrington’s childhood home. They’ll be hosting Christmas dinner this year. Life moving on, as it should.
“I feel this is a new chapter for the two of us.”
But sport will remain an important part of her life.
“Every woman or man who get up in the morning and are trying to do something in sport, they are already winning because somebody is looking up to them, it could be their niece, nephew, cousin, their next-door neighbours’ kids – somebody is looking up to them.
“Whether you are winning on the field or the pitch or whatever, you are winning at life and that’s the most important thing.”
It’s that same perspective that will see Harrington pull the front door behind her on Christmas Day for a few hours and travel the short distance to Fairview Hospital to punch in for work.
“In the past I used to have the ward and I used to have all the patients in the ward and it would be absolutely magical. On Christmas Day I would bring them all in presents and we’d open them together, I just used to love it,” she said.
“Work is not the same at the moment because the hospital is bit by bit closing down, all the patients on my ward have been moved to nursing homes.
“They are going to build a new hospital, so I’m holding out hope that I will still be there when they do build the new hospital and we’ll go back to the way it was on the ward with the patients. It won’t be the same patients, but I’ll still give them all the love that I have.”
As Kellie Harrington found out in The Shelbourne on Friday, the love flows both ways.
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