{"id":223068,"date":"2025-10-24T16:49:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T16:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/223068\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T16:49:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T16:49:07","slug":"olympic-champion-harrington-coming-out-of-retirement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/223068\/","title":{"rendered":"Olympic champion Harrington coming out of retirement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two-time Olympic champion Kellie Harrington has revealed her intention to come out of retirement and box at the Irish National Elite Championships in January.<\/p>\n

The 35-year-old Dubliner stepped away from competitive action immediately after retaining her lightweight gold in Paris last year, when she became the first Irish female Olympian to win medals at different Games. She is also a former World and European champion.<\/p>\n

However, Harrington has been back in training<\/a> since late last year, and her return does not come as a huge surprise.<\/p>\n

“I’ve had a year of living somewhat normal. And normal is not for me, for now,” she told the Irish Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“That\u2019s the good thing about life, we\u2019re allowed to make our minds up, we\u2019re allowed to change them again and make it back up and change it again.<\/p>\n

“I\u2019ll be 36 in December. So, why not? I\u2019m saying nothing about the [2028] Olympics or anything like that.<\/p>\n

“But I do just think, imagine if I didn\u2019t give it another go. I\u2019m fit, I\u2019m kind of healthy. I have a few niggles at the moment but in general I\u2019m healthy. So why wouldn\u2019t I?<\/p>\n

“It’s all small steps. The biggest step is the [Olympic] qualifiers in 2027, in Istanbul in Turkey, probably in July. But that\u2019s only a blink of an eye away really. And look, it could be all over by January anyway.<\/p>\n

“If I step into the ring and I lose a fight, it’s fine because nobody has died. I\u2019ll get out and I\u2019ll still hopefully be healthy and it\u2019s only a loss.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two-time Olympic champion Kellie Harrington has revealed her intention to come out of retirement and box at the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-223068","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}