speaking to the Irish Times, external<\/a>, said it is her intention to compete in January’s Irish Elite Championships having made the decision to return to the ring.<\/p>\n“I’ve had a year of living somewhat normal and normal is not for me. It’s just not for me, for now.” she said.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“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?”<\/p>\n
Harrington will first step through the ropes in Dublin in December for a night of exhibition boxing before then turning her attention to January’s Irish Elite Championships where she will seek a 12th title.<\/p>\n
Should that materialise, then it will likely open the door for a shot at next year’s Olympic qualifiers.<\/p>\n
“It’s all small steps and small steps before the biggest step of them all,” she added.<\/p>\n
“The biggest step is the qualifiers in 2027, in Istanbul in Turkey, probably in July. Not thinking too far ahead or anything, but that’s only a blink of an eye away really. And look, it could be all over by January anyway. I’ll never look past the Nationals because anything can happen.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two-time Olympic gold medallist Kellie Harrington has confirmed she is to come out of retirement. The Dubliner won…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-223334","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\/223334","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=223334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}