Katie Taylor prepares for emotional retirement fight at Croke Park

When Katie Taylor began boxing, she sometimes entered junior contests as “K Taylor”, her hair tucked beneath her headguard so nobody would realise she was a girl.

Now aged 40, she is preparing to bow out from the sport in style in front of 80,000 fans at Dublin’s Croke Park on Saturday.

Unbeaten French challenger Flora Pili stands in the way of Taylor becoming undisputed world champion for a third time, with the Irishwoman’s WBA, IBF and WBO super-lightweight titles on the line, along with the vacant WBC belt.

“I’m not sure if there’s any other country in the world where 80,000 people would turn up for a female athlete,” Taylor said this week.

“I want to put on a performance worthy of everyone’s support over the years. This country has travelled around the world to watch me fight,” she added.

Taylor’s storied career has taken her to some of the biggest venues around the globe.

In 2022, she and Amanda Serrano became the first women to headline a boxing card at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Taylor has also boxed at Wembley, Cardiff’s Principality Stadium and the homes of the Dallas Cowboys and Boston Celtics.

But she craved a return home and the first boxing show at Croke Park – the home of Irish Gaelic sports – since heavyweight great Muhammad Ali beat Al “Blue” Lewis there in 1972.

Taylor, though, warned she cannot let the celebration surrounding her retirement affect her performance.

“It is too dangerous of a sport to have your body in the ring and your heart outside of it thinking about retirement,” she said.

Olympic breakthrough

Taylor was just 15 when she contested Ireland’s first officially sanctioned women’s boxing match in 2001.

As a girl, she wrote to Irish world champion Deirdre Gogarty about her difficulty in finding fights and later campaigned for women’s boxing to be admitted to the Olympics.

When women were finally allowed to compete at the London Games in 2012, she won lightweight gold.

Although she fell short of another medal in Rio four years later, it did not dampen Taylor’s rise to stardom after turning professional in 2016.

She needed just seven fights to secure her first world title and later held all four major belts at lightweight before moving up to super-lightweight and achieving the same feat.

Her professional record stands at 25 wins and one defeat.

A fatal gangland shooting at a Dublin boxing weigh-in in the same year Taylor turned professional a decade ago was followed by a long absence of major professional boxing from Ireland.

When Taylor finally fought in Dublin in May 2023, Chantelle Cameron spoiled the party by handing her the sole loss of her professional career.

Taylor reversed the result six months later to claim Cameron’s super-lightweight belts and has since retained them in two more bouts against Serrano in the United States.

Her impact on the other side of the Atlantic was apparent at Wednesday’s public workout where 10-year-old Clodagh Keating was invited into the ring and reduced to tears at meeting her heroine.

Taylor said seeing boxing gyms now filled with girls was “the best part” of her legacy.

She expects the emotion to land after the punches stop.

“In a few days, I’ll make my last ring walk,” she said.

“I’ll look back on this in a few years and I imagine I’ll be overwhelmed”.