Katie’s glittering career now in US as father-daughter fairytale turned to dust

WHEN Katie Taylor was accumulating medals like shirt buttons, her father’s place in the story always bore the efficacy of a giant, protective oak.

Everything she became carried Pete’s stamp, be it technical or emotional.

They seemed inseparable. Katie seldom did a media interview without him by her side and, when she suffered one of the few, legitimate losses of her amateur career at the 2006 European Union Championships in Sardinia, she cited his absence as the reason. “Mentally, I just wasn’t right,” she said after that quarter-final bout against Turkey’s Gulsum Tatar. “I was nervous and tense all day, simply because my dad was not there.”

So much of their lives became entwined in the crusade to get women’s boxing recognised as an Olympic sport, Katie’s gold medal in London felt like the expression of a modern, father-daughter fairytale.

Because until then, until Olympia opened its doors to female boxers, Katie Taylor’s greatest victories had been achieved in the sparselyattended, militaristic halls of obscure cities out of which there was rarely access to quality TV footage.

Her recurring ‘Late Late Show’ appearances, thus, acquired a faintly surreal form. Katie was routinely touted as potentially Ireland’s greatest athlete without many ever having even seen her in the ring. London changed everything.

At the time, Pete expressed a hope his daughter wouldn’t fight again, given how difficult he found it as a father “watching their daughter in there, getting punched”.

And it would have been unimaginable that day she beat Russian Sofya Ochigava in the ExCel Arena to envisage Katie even contemplating an Olympic defence four years later without Pete in her corner.

But by the time Rio came, the fairytale had turned to dust. The harrowing impact the breakdown of her parents’ marriage had on Katie was on cruelly public show the day she lost to a 35-year-old Finn in Brazil.

Her post-fight TV interview would have drawn tears from a stone, as the sheer emotional turmoil of

her new circumstance found stark expression.

Pete Taylor watched Katie’s doomed Olympic defence on TV in an eastern European city, having taken himself out of the country to avoid questions about their sundered relationship.

In an interview with this writer, he admitted watching her suffer from afar had been “a nightmare”.

Two years on, both their lives looked to have moved on without any apparent reconciliation.

Pete has remained in high demand as a coach in Bray (he is currently training two unbeaten Irish professionals, David Oliver Joyce and Gary Cully) and has been involved in a number of business ventures, most recently fronting ‘Club Box’, a fitness work-out designed around boxing. And Katie has won her first nine contests as a professional, securing the WBA and IBF World Lightweight crowns.

None have been in Ireland, and given Matchroom’s recent signing of a reputed $1bn transatlantic broadcast deal with online streaming platform DAZN, it is thought the remainder of her career will be in the US where she is coached by Ross Enamait.

Katie’s next fight is expected to be a title defence in July, although no opponent has yet been named.