Bright side as Bolger rolls with punches
Germany national boxing team head coach happy with extra preparation time
FOR MOST involved in the sporting world, the enforced shutdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic will have caused thundering headaches, but boxing coach Eddie Bolger is looking on the bright side, illustrating that even the darkest of clouds can part to reveal a silver lining.
As head of the German national team, all roads led to the Tokyo Olympics, which were pencilled in for this summer before being rescheduled for next year, but Bolger isn’t cursing his luck, instead embracing the extra preparation time.
The Wexford man took over the sleeping giants of world boxing in 2017 and believes an extra year in the Olympic cycle will certainly be more beneficial than detrimental to his young charges.
‘The beauty of Germany is that we have regional coaches, we have 20 or 30 paid coaches. There would be a smaller number in the elite circle and I correspond with these guys maybe every Monday to see how things are going for the week,’ he said.
‘Then I would contact the athletes every Friday and just make sure they’re in good form, motivated and dealing well with this timeframe. It’s all positive really for us. The extra year will probably do us more good than bad.
‘We’ve a young team. We’ve gone through four years of me being at the helm and we’ve been trying to identify young talent for 2020, or 2021 as it is is now, and ‘24, and with young talent you need international challenges and bouts, you need to live in training camps, you need to develop them technically and mentally, and another year is better for us,’ he added.
One of his star protégés, Hamsat Shadalov, booked his place in Tokyo at the European leg of Olympic boxing qualification in London in March, an event which had to be cancelled mid-stream due to the coronavirus crisis, with a victory over the European Elite champion, Ireland’s Kurt Walker, and Bolger admitted it’s nice to get one over his old bosses.
‘It’s big because it can be felt at home and all of a sudden people know you exist again. We got a difficult draw. It always is a difficult draw when you’re in an emerging team, you’re implementing new structures and identifying new talent.
‘I felt that Hamsat was one of our emerging talents, but then to meet Kurt. His first fight was very difficult too, a great performance against a guy from Belarus. And then facing Kurt we felt confident, but it was a tough draw and another great performance,’ he said.
Although the qualifiers in London were shrouded in controversy, as a handful of boxers were diagnosed with Covid-19 after competing at the event, which was suspended the day after Shadalov’s victory over Walker at the Copperbox Arena, Bolger again accentuated the positives.
‘Boxers want to box and coaches want to coach, and we were really hoping we’d get to the end of it. I remember commenting after seeing the draw, I hope it’s cancelled and we’ll start again,’ he said.
‘It was probably the worst scenario that could have happened that it was cancelled halfway through it, but it kind of did end on a high. Young Brendan Irvine qualified for Ireland, we got one over the line, GB got two over the line, so after the break there’s a little bit of comfort that we’ve already got one qualified.
‘Now we can plan for an opponent months in advance or a year in advance, which doesn’t normally happen in Olympic boxing,’ he said.
Now that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, Bolger won’t be wasting time in ramping up preparations for the Tokyo spectacle, having already sent out invitations to countries to compete in the Cologne Cup in October.
He will be firmly focused on the remaining European qualifiers and the rescheduled World Olympic qualifying tournament in Paris when he returns to the centre of excellence in Heidelberg.
‘We’ve a couple on the verge of getting a chance to qualify, getting to that final bout. We’ve six left in the competition, including Hamsat, who will be trying to get a seeding for Tokyo.
‘For me on my first Olympic cycle, I’d rather go with a small quality team but I’ll take as many as I can get. You hope to get as many as you can over the line, but three, four or five would be a great achievement in our first cycle working together,’ he said.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and getting his team back to anywhere near the heights that Germany enjoyed in the past won’t be achieved overnight, but Bolger has methodically put a plan in place and his approach is slowly starting to pay dividends.
‘The talent pool is excellent and coaching is top-notch. The facilities are second to none throughout the world, absolutely top class.
‘I think where the fault was, was just adapting and changing from the old GDR [German Democratic Republic] system. They needed somebody fresh to come in and that could have been anybody.
‘Just somebody to come in and identify what world class was and what people are doing in the present environment, the guys that are winning and getting on podiums, or the countries that are consistently getting on podiums.
‘We needed to see what these are doing. I took the programmes from Ireland and we changed a little bit, and you can see the benefits,’ he said.
‘It’s going to take a long time. The high performance system in Dublin was introduced in 2002 I believe, full-time training. I think the first Olympic medal was 2008, so it does take a long time.
‘Definitely to change the mindset of people that had so much success in the GDR time it’s difficult. In the last year or two we’ve seen change and progress,’ said the native of Liam Mellows Park in Wexford town.
Bolger was born into a family steeped in boxing, with the O’Connors, on his mother’s side of the family, in particular starring in their days in the ring.
‘That’s how I really got into boxing. I used to spend a lot of time in my grandmother’s. The house was full of trophies and medals, so that’s where the curiousity began.
‘I joined the C.B.S. boxing club around ’78 when I was eight. It was the original club and when I joined there was probably two clubs, Wexford C.B.S. and St. Joseph’s.
‘There was a lot of good boxers, Joe Fenlon, Mick Cullen, Jimmy Meyler, lots that came up through the C.B.S. They had a very intelligent man, a very good life coach, In Aldan O'Sullivan,' he said.
Bolger reached a high level between the ropes himself, winning Youth 1, Youth 2, Intermediate and Senior national titles, but It's In coaching that he has really made a name for himself, although it was a terrible tragedy that put him on that particular path.
'I had a very good coach, Llam Walsh from Fisher's Row. He was a head coach In the Wexford C.B.S. club. He was involved in a car accident, he was hit by a car and he died.
'I was the oldest In the club at the time so my role transformed Into a coach. I was 23 or 24 at the time and that was a necessity for that role to be filled, it was either that or maybe the club would have closed.' he said.
Bolger took to the coaching game like a duck to water, and with top-class fighters like the Byrne brothers under his wing, he began to turn heads, leading to an
invitation to join Irish boxing’s elite high performance team in 2008.
‘I probably got my first opportunity as a high performance coach in Dublin on the back of the achievements of Gary and Eddie Byrne. Other guys like Anthony Furlong and Seamus King went on to be Irish champions, and I probably got credit for their achievements, and got a phone call to come up and help on a weekly basis, every Saturday morning up in Dublin,’ he said.
He wasn’t accredited for the London Olympics, working as an unpaid volunteer at the time, but he played his part in the successes of Katie Taylor, John Joe Nevin, Michael Conlan and Paddy Barnes, and enjoyed every second of the journey.
‘I was doing it for four or five years without a position or any pay, but when you’re holding pads or implementing programmes, the boxers don’t see you as a volunteer. It was the same role, the only difference was that I didn’t get paid.
‘I worked with the guys in the preparation leading up to London. I didn’t travel to the London Olympics as I didn’t have accreditation. It was like serving my time really, it was a good experience,’ he said.
Bolger’s hard work eventually paid off, becoming an integral part of Ireland’s High Performance Unit, a natural progression having worked closely with fellow Wexford man Billy Walsh and Zaur Antia in a voluntary capacity for so long.
When his good friend Walsh departed for the U.S.A. in controversial circumstances in 2015, with the Irish Amateur Boxing Association (I.A.B.A.) allowing the talented coach to slip through their fingers, it must have been a strange time for Bolger, but he said it was just a case of life goes on.
‘To be honest, where I worked, and that’s on the gym floor, things were normal. We just carried on. There was myself, John Conlan, and Zaur took up the role of head coach.
‘The process every day was the same, same training techniques. Billy had drifted into the role of High Performance Director because of necessity, so he didn’t really spend as much time on the floor. That was our role so from that point of view nothing really changed for us regarding our preparation.
‘It was just the fact that we knew Billy was fighting a battle. We tried to not let it influence us at all, and it didn’t,’ he said.
Bolger’s first experience of the Olympic cauldron came in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, working with the likes of Katie Taylor, Paddy Barnes, Joe Ward and Michael Conlan in a Games that was shrouded in controversy for Irish boxers, with some extremely questionable decisions still sticking in his throat.
‘It was a very difficult experience but I’m sure it will benefit in my career going forward. It was a difficult time. We went with such excitement and such optimism, but it was fairly difficult from the start.
‘There was some good performances from our team, performances that in the past would have seen our hands being raised. Day after day nothing seemed to go our way, but the performances were good.
‘The A.I.B.A. have borne the brunt of it since then so we’re in new territory with the Tokyo Olympics, with the I.O.C. taking charge of judging.
‘It’s an objective sport but you do your job, work hard in the gyms and try to box to the criteria that you think you’re going to be judged on. Nobody can ask for anything more than that, but sometimes it can be mind-boggling when you’ve done enough and you don’t get the decisions.
‘This is one of the biggest downsides to boxing, the biggest obstacle that you have to overcome sometimes. Unfortunately, it’s always been that way and it will probably be that way forever. We just have to keep trying to adapt to it,’ he said.
Like Billy Walsh before him, Bolger’s departure from Irish boxing in 2017 was avoidable, had he got more recognition from the I.A.B.A., but having been headhunted by the German Boxing Federation and offered a four-year deal, he made the decision to take a leap of faith.
‘Even when I flew to Frankfurt for my interview it was the unknown, and I was thinking it’s better the devil you know. My role kind of changed when Billy left. A lot of people would interact with me and see me as somebody they could relate to.
‘My role evolved into something like a head coach, which I wasn’t, Zaur was the head coach.
‘I wanted to get acknowledgement that this is what I was doing on a daily basis. Of course, everybody looks to better their contract and get better security because I was only getting one year contracts.
‘One year is not a long time, so I wasn’t even talking financially, I just wanted a little bit more security and a bit more acknowledgement for what my role was,’ he said.
The 50-year-old has clearly moved on from those tumultuous times and is leaving no stone unturned as he looks forward to the challenges ahead, but he does admit that the ante is turned up when German fighters pit their wits against a boxer from his home country.
‘That’s when the pressure is on me, moreso than any of our boxers. You feel this is how you’ll be judged. It’s a little bit personal, in a good way.
‘It brings a little bit of added pressure, but no more than when we go up against the U.S.A. We always meet up afterwards.
‘It’s a good rivalry but it’s definitely a rivalry that exists between myself, Billy and Zaur, but purely in the way it should be in a sporting sense,’ he said.
Bolger has another four-year contract on the table, which if he signs on the dotted line would keep him in the job until 2024, but for now his eyes are firmly on Tokyo and helping to bring back medals to a country that has had a dearth of success in recent years, having only won one bronze in Rio four years ago and leaving London (2012) and Beijing (2008) empty-handed.
‘That’s the plan. You try to make an impact in the qualifiers and then when you get to Tokyo you’d try to make an impact there.
‘It’s a very young team. There’s a bit of experience in there too that will help the younger ones, but we’re looking to build. It’s a good team that’s developing and we’d like to make an impact at the Olympic Games,’ he said.