There is constant torment, should I be over there?
Renowned Irish-based Ukrainian coach driven by desire to help his homeland...
IGOR KHMIL was reluctant to do this interview. He didn’t want to be seen as telling his story when the lives of family and friends remained in grave danger. But as a Ukrainian living in Ireland, he knows it is important to keep the war in the public’s mind.
Khmil is head coach of Smithfield Boxing Club, a success story within Irish boxing over the past 15 years. Founded on North Brunswick Street before moving to an atmospheric sports hall in Aughrim Street, the club is one of the most progressive in Ireland, producing national champions and running an annual Boxfest, which saw Dublin fighters taking on the cream of eastern Europe, before Covid intervened.
We meet a few yards from its door. Khmil has the squat, muscular frame and squashed nose of a former lightweight champion and holds his fist out to meet yours.
‘A boxer’s greeting,’ he says with a smile that belies the constant worry on his mind these past six weeks.
He came to Dublin ‘out of curiosity’ more than 20 years ago.
The plan was to stay for a few weeks, but he ended up putting down roots. He has a teenage daughter here and has worked as a sports officer for Dublin City Council for the past 14 years.
Khmil grew up in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in western Ukraine roughly 200km from the Polish border. His family remain there, despite being asked to join him in Dublin.
They don’t want to leave where they call home. The place has escaped the worst of the Russian bombardment although its airport has been subjected to a number of strategic strikes.
‘In my city, everyone lives within a 5km radius of the airport, so it would be like living in Swords. Imagine that, and Dublin airport gets bombarded. I have relations who live quite close to it, and all their windows were shattered,’ said Khmil.
His mother, Orysya, is a maths teacher and her classes have gone online as the local schools are being used to house people who have fled from the east of the country. He speaks to her every day. While it’s reassuring to hear her voice, it leaves the same question gnawing at him. Should I be over there? It’s the same thing he has asked himself since that fateful February morning when Vladimir Putin shocked the world.
‘You go through different phases of emotion. Initially, you are just gobsmacked. Shock. Watching on telly first, you are thinking this can’t be happening. It is only a nightmare. I will wake up,’ Khmil says in English that is marked by two decades in Dublin.
‘Then, you feel guilt because you know people you boxed and trained with, boxed against, are on the frontline, literally defending the country and you are wondering am I doing my bit. Half of you is thinking I should go over and the other half is thinking I can make more of an impact here, raising funds, getting the message out.
‘I was getting calls from people I used to train, Irish people, wondering about going over. A friend of mine, a consultant down in Limerick, another Ukrainian was wondering if he should go over because there is a shortage of doctors. You have to weigh up where you can be most effective.’
He immediately set up a WhatsApp group among his friends in the boxing scene. It became the United 4 Ukraine campaign. Kellie Harrington was straight onto him, offering an autographed vest. MMA fighter Cathal Pendred did a roll-athon with other MMA clubs.
On the first weekend of May, they are planning to run a show in the National Stadium, similar to Smithfield Boxfest. There will be quality fights, with the cream of Dublin’s boxers, but also singing, dancing. Things to engage the non-boxing fan. ‘It’s only a little thing,’ he sighs. But it might just keep Ukraine to the forefront of minds here.
‘It is not just my family that are staying over there. There are loads of people who are doing what they can to defend the country.
‘Accommodating people from eastern Ukraine, making food and knitting nets for the soldiers. The unity of the whole country has been incredible.
‘It is horrific. When you see the images on television and social media with elderly people standing in front of tanks, old women telling soldiers to ‘f**k off from here, this is my land’, you have an emotional response and there is this constant torment, should I be over there?
‘And when you ring your nearest and dearest, you wonder is there going to be a day when the phone doesn’t pick up again. Is this thing coming at them? I have a massive extended family and some of them are in the army, cousins who are in the frontline and you don’t know if you are going to be told that they are dead. Horrible feeling,’ he says, shaking his head at the utter madness of it all. Orysya tells him that when air sirens go off now there isn’t the sense of panic that was felt initially. ‘They keep going about their business, they are just thinking what will be will be.’
Khmil is a four-time Ukrainian champion at 60kgs and 57 kgs and narrowly missed out on a place in the 2000 Sydney Olympics. He boxed on the same national teams as the Klitschkos. He had just completed a physical education degree and had taken his first steps in coaching when he arrived in Ireland. He came at a good time as in South Circular Road, Gary Keegan and Billy Walsh were formulating a plan to make Irish boxing great.
‘I was trying to get my name out there as a coach so I was dipping in and out of the High Performance. I did a bit of coaching, sparring or pad work. I was still fairly young, but was in with the likes of Andy (Lee), Kenneth Egan and (Paul) McCloskey,’ he remembers.
‘I had multiple conversations with Gary and Billy. Gary was keen to know how things worked in Ukraine and receptive to trips there with the national squad. He was always looking for ideas, asking why Ukrainian boxers seemed content to manage a lead when they were a couple of points ahead in a bout. He was very inquisitive, wanted to know everything about Ukrainian boxing.
‘I told him that a Ukrainian boxer would always see himself boxing for the gold medal, so he was conserving energy for the next fight. It opened Gary’s eyes that the Irish approach should be a bit smarter. Why should you wear yourself out in every fight, especially when you are winning.’
He still works with the IABA High Performance programme and is going to a training camp this week with the elite squad.
Before that, he spent a year working in Portlaoise prison, teaching physical education courses to inmates.
‘That was amazing to me at the time, because in Ukraine, prison is very much a place to punish people. But this was an initiative run by the Department of Education, educating and rehabilitating prisoners. That was very rewarding.’
And like every boxing coach, he knows that the sport offers a vital outlet to so many in society. ‘Boxing saves lives, it worked miracles in my life. Every job I have had has come from the fact I was a boxer or boxing coach.’
Ukraine has produced some of the best boxers of the past decade – their Under 22 team performed heroically at the recent European Championships winning two golds, three silvers and five bronzes. Legendary figures such as the Klitschko brothers, current heavyweight champion Oleskandr Usyk and former lightweight champion
Vasiliy Lomachenko have all joined the war effort with the latter even turning down the chance to regain his world lightweight crown to continue defending his homeland. He knows of two renowned Ukrainian coaches who have already died in the conflict.
‘Lomachenko preferred to stay on the frontline. That was like wow! He was getting a bit of stick in the past, because he was staying neutral and saying it wasn’t the peoples’ fault. Some felt he wasn’t condemning Russia strongly enough. And I know there was pressure on him to take the fight from government level, because they felt that he might make more of an impact, flying the Ukrainian flag like that rather than running around the streets of Odessa.
‘But it is an unbelievable gesture for him. And I can’t think if something happened him. He is a global superstar, even if he injured his leg or something worse, the ructions it would cause.’
He has been proud of the Irish reaction to the invasion and hopes it will continue. Even if the bloodshed ends tomorrow, his country will need to be rebuilt. That’s why the show at the start of May is so important.
He recalls a couple of years ago when his club, like every boxing club in Ireland, ran an anti-bullying campaign.
‘It was about standing up to the bully, and I think in a way, that is how Putin is acting here, like a bully. But the Ukrainian people have stood up to him. I have so much pride, it is a sad pride but I think wow, it is incredible what they are doing. ‘There is a line in our national anthem – we are willing to give up our body and soul for our freedom – and that sums up the Ukrainian people. We don’t tolerate injustice, that is what happened in the revolution in 2014, the orange revolution in 2004 and 2005. We will stand up for what we believe is right, no matter what the cost. The way that Putin has behaved is not the behaviour of the 21st century, and that is why it is so important to stand up against that.’
l To get involved in United 4 Ukraine campaign, see justgiving. com/fundraising/united-ukraine or contact Smithfield Boxing Club on Twitter, Facebook or by email at smithfieldboxingclub@gmail.com