Homecoming queens
Golden girl Amy plans to buy house with prize money
ONE of Ireland’s latest boxing golden girls plans to use her World Championship prize money to buy her own home.
World champs Amy Broadhurst and Lisa O’Rourke received a rapturous welcome home in Dublin Airport yesterday evening as they returned from their gold medal triumphs in Turkey.
Amy told the Irish Mail on Sunday she hopes her knockout performances will help her find a home of her own, once the €94,000 lands in her account.
The 25-year-old Dundalk woman said: ‘I’m going to try my very, very best to get a mortgage. I said about six weeks ago that if I could walk away from boxing with a house and a car, I’ve gained something from boxing rather than just taking smacks the whole time.’
She joked that she wouldn’t be happy ‘until it hits the bank account because who knows what’s going to happen. It might never come through’.
The light-welterweight (60-63kg) champion said she would take a few weeks to relax now, beginning with a favourite indulgence.
‘I’m going home for a Chinese takeaway,’ she laughed.
Teammate Lisa was in tears as her elated parents and three sisters greeted her in Terminal 1, her other sister Aoife was alongside her having also competed in
Turkey. Lisa, from
Roscommon, won the light-middleweight (6670kg) championship on Thursday, aged just 20, in her first elite competition.
She told MoS: ‘I didn’t expect it but I definitely won’t complain. It’s nice to be in the history books along with Katie [Taylor] and Kellie [Harrington] – it’s unreal to have our names alongside those two.’
Lisa said she is hoping to join up with the Roscommon football team again soon. She said: ‘They’re out on June 5 against Kildare, so I hope to be out on the pitch with them.’
Her teammate Caroline Conway said: ‘Any forward trying to get through that, fair play to them.’
And Lisa’s ecstatic mother Anne added: ‘I used to be giving out about the boxing, but they were that into
it I had to let them at it and look where they are now.’
Amy and Lisa became the fourth and fifth Irish athletes to win gold at world championship level, after Taylor, Harrington and Belfast man Michael Conlon.