Carruth: Gold is our only option
SI LV E R and bronze won’t suffice for Michael Car r u t h this summer. In 1992, gold was the only medal that would do and he wants to see an Irish boxer take the same discerning view in London.
‘Listen, if we don’t win an Olympic gold medal this year, it’s a failure,’ said the Barcelona gold medallist yesterday.
‘I’m putting my old buddy, Billy Walsh, under pressure there but it’s 20 years since I won at the Olympic Games. We need to be winning at the Olympic Games in boxing — be it the male version or female version.’
Walsh, the high performance chief of the Irish Amateur Boxing Association, might find that the ‘pressure’ is lifted without him doing very much at all, if Katie Taylor lives up to her billing.
Taylor is coached almost exclusively by her father, Pete, and the furrows on Walsh’s brow will instead be creased by the men trying to go one better than Kenny Egan did four years ago.
But Carruth, a development officer with the IABA, has great confidence in John Joe Nevin, Paddy Barnes and Darr en O’neill and believes another three qualifiers will join that trio in the team next month, including the precocious Joe Ward.
‘I don’t want to be putting pressure on them but they have been fully funded for the last 10 years with the high performance,’ he said of the elite crew.
‘We’ve shown at the Europeans and the worlds and things like that that we’re capable of winning medals.
‘Now we need to go to the next stage. Go to the Holy Grail and produce it. I’m privileged to be the first, I don’t want to be the last. That’s God’s honest truth. We need to produce another gold medallist.’
Carruth expects Ward’s confidence to be ‘sky-high’ after his emphatic dethroning of Kenny Egan at the national championships and victory last week at the high- class Chemistry Cup in Germany.
But the Moate teenager still has the minefield of qualifying in Turkey to negotiate, and a surer bet at this stage to be involved at the business end of the Olympics may be welterweight Nevin.
‘John Joe has won two world bronze medals, he’s the only Irish boxer to ever do that,’ said Carruth, appearing in Dublin at the launch of Cadbury as official treat supplier to the Irish Olympic and Paralympic teams.
‘My argument to that is that I never went for my second world title! But John Joe is a phenomenal boxer.
‘Any boxer that qualifies for Ireland has a chance, and I’m not talking bull****. Any of our lads have a chance, a genuine chance, of winning medals.
‘Thirty years ago if you drew an Irish boxer, you thought, “t hey’re al l a bunch of p***heads” because of the mentality, the whole thing.
‘Now we’re in the club that nobody wants. Nobody wants to draw an Irish boxer.’
Carruth said he saw no reason not to be confident that Taylor, rated the No 1 poundfor-pound female boxer in the world, will secure her passage to London at the World Championships in China, which run from May 9 to 20.
But he is aghast at the timing, with the women who successfully qualify for London left with only two months to prepare.
‘It’s too late. They should have been qualifying next month as well [as the men, who glove off in Trabzon on April 13],’ he said.
‘I can’t understand the logic of this, i njury- wise and in terms of peaking again. I think they’ve run it a little bit shabbily in the girls’ department. Katie should be qualified for the Olympics now.’
Pinned down as to how many men he thinks will emerge from the final qualifier in Turkey, the Dubliner said: ‘I’m going for three. I’m being realistic as well.
‘I think Joe Ward will qualify. I think Paddy Barnes will qualify and I’m hoping that Ross Hickey will qualify.’