Katie Taylor prepares for final career fight at Croke Park

“I won’t be like Tyson Fury, coming back again and again,” Katie Taylor told me with a little smile a few years ago as she explained how, when she finally retired, she would leave boxing for good. The moment is almost here because, on Saturday night, in front of 80,000 fans at a fevered Croke Park, Taylor will fight for the very last time. She will depart as a quietly defiant pioneer and an overwhelming force for good – both in Ireland and women’s boxing.

The fight game is full of heartbreak and broken promises, corruption and damage, but it also produces singular characters who elevate the world. Joe Louis in the 1930s, and Muhammad Ali in the 1960s, had a profound impact on American society. In a very different world today, Oleksandr Usyk is also more than a boxer. He remains an inspiration and a source of undimmed hope in wartime Ukraine.

Taylor’s story might carry less global significance but that suits her. The Irish, after all, have always loved her humility in the bombastic business of boxing. They also revere the trailblazing Taylor as she made it possible for girls and women to become fighters.

This week, Ireland is even more besotted with its favourite sporting personality. Apart from being at Croke Park, the ancestral home of Irish sport, Taylor’s last fight will be screened live on free-to-view television so the whole country can watch her say farewell on RTÉ. A supermarket in her home town, Bray, has been renamed the Katie Taylor Lidl Store – while Barry Keoghan paid glossy tribute to her in a promotional video.

It might seem a tad cheesy, with the actor talking earnestly in an Irish pub, as the Celtic music swirls in the background, but there is truth in Keoghan’s brooding brogue: “It’s a funny thing, greatness. It’s rarely found in the loudest voice. See, back when the boxing world believed it belonged only to boys, a girl walks into a gym. Fighting not as Katie but as K from Bray … before there was a path, there was Katie. With each step she trod new ground.”

In 2022 Taylor told me: “It was not easy. Boxing runs in my family’s blood but there were no opportunities for girls. I followed my brothers to the gym but I had to pretend I was a boy to get fights. We had to put my name down as K Taylor. I would pull the headgear on, tuck my hair inside so no one could see it and get into the ring. When I won and took the headgear off there would be uproar when everyone saw I was a girl.”

When she was six years old, Katie stood on a kitchen chair and opened her arms wide as she pretended she had just won an Olympic medal. Yet women’s boxing did not exist in the Olympics and females were banned from the ring in Ireland and the UK.

Her father, Peter, led the crusade for her to feature in the first official female boxing contest in Ireland. She made history by outboxing Alanna Audley at Dublin’s National Stadium on 31 October 2001. “The hardest part was the media interest,” Taylor recalled. “It was a bit much for a girl of 15.”

Six years later, Taylor and Canada’s Katie Dunn fought an exhibition in Illinois as the International Olympic Committee considered whether women’s boxing was worthy of a place at the Games. One official warned that the future of women’s boxing rested on her performance. Taylor put on a dazzling display and eventually won gold at London 2012 – the first Olympics to feature women’s boxing.

It had been a long road to reach that point. Middle-aged male boxing administrators had asked her “what do you do with your breasts when you’re in the ring?” while, at the 2010 World Championships, the organisers ordered female fighters to wear skirts. Taylor refused; the committee men buckled.

Taylor’s resolve matched her skills and she flourished as a professional. My favourite memory of following her was the night in April 2022 when she and Amanda Serrano headlined Madison Square Garden in New York. It’s still one of the greatest fights I’ve ever seen live.

In the basement of the Garden I told Taylor how moved we had been watching her and Serrano. She smiled and said thank you, her face etched with weary pride. Afterwards, as I walked back to my hotel in the early hours, I wondered why boxing couldn’t always be so pure.

But there was a shadow over Taylor’s career as, for her first six-and-half years as a pro, she couldn’t fight at home. There had been no professional boxing in Ireland since a gangland shooting at a boxing weigh-in at Dublin’s Regency Hotel in 2015. The planned target of the assassination had been Daniel Kinahan, head of the Kinahan cartel. He was finally extradited back to Ireland from Dubai last month and will soon stand trial on multiple charges. But Kinahan’s involvement in boxing cost Taylor so much.

She was 36 before she finally fought in Ireland. In May 2023, as the undisputed world lightweight champion with a flawless 22-0 pro record, she made her homecoming. She had moved up a division to challenge Chantelle Cameron, the imposing and unified super-lightweight world champion, at the 3Arena – less than three miles from the Regency.

It was another unforgettable night but the outstanding Cameron won a majority decision. The rematch was six months later, at the same venue, and the normally reserved and polite Taylor bristled when someone asked if she would retire if she lost again to Cameron. “Don’t insult me,” she said.

Once more she defied the odds as, this time, the majority decision went her way after another bruising fight. There was no rubber match against Cameron as Taylor chose to defeat Serrano twice more to sweep their trilogy. Now, as she steps into the ring for the last time with a 25-1 record, Taylor will face the unbeaten but obscure Flora Pili.

Taylor will defend all three of her world super-lightweight titles and has the chance to lift the vacant WBC belt as well. If she wins, as she surely must, she will retire as the undisputed champion – not just of her chosen division but of women’s boxing, and Ireland itself.

“I dreamed impossible dreams,” Taylor told Boxing News recently. “Now I’ll get my fairytale ending.”

At the age of 40, Taylor has given her life to boxing. Saturday night at Croke Park will be a resounding and tear-streaked goodbye, as deserved as it is emotional.