Ireland’s Kellie Harrington celebrates with her lightweight boxing gold medal at the Paris Olympics
Two-time Olympic champion Kellie Harrington is coming out of retirement and is keeping an open mind about targeting a run at the Los Angeles Games in 2028.
The 35-year-old boxer announced she was hanging up her gloves after winning a second Olympic title in Paris last year, but now plans to return to the ring, with her first comeback fight set to be in an exhibition bout in the Mansion House on December 2. Her first major target will be the national championships in January.
“After the Olympics, I just announced my retirement,” said the lightweight boxer in an interview with the Irish Times. “But that’s the good thing about life, we’re allowed to make our minds up, we’re allowed to change them again and make it back up and change it again.
“I’ll be 36 in December. So, why not? I’m saying nothing about the [next] Olympics or anything like that. Everybody knows me. I’ll never say anything about winning or going to the Olympics. I always look at one fight at a time, one competition at a time. And that’s exactly what I’m doing.
“But I do just think, imagine if I didn’t give it another go. I’m fit, I’m kind of healthy. I have a few niggles at the moment but in general I’m healthy. So why wouldn’t I?”
Harrington, the 11-time national champion, has kept in shape and revealed that she travelled to the World Championships in Liverpool where she sparred with some of the competitors.
“I’ve had more than a year and I’ve had time to reflect on why I actually started boxing in the first place,” she said. “It was to get me out of the hole, the wrong road that I was going down. And I’ve had time to reminisce on how I felt when I started boxing first and how I want that feeling again.”