Jenny Lehane swapped taekwondo for boxing just five years ago and will represent Ireland at the Paris Olympics.
IN AMATEUR BOXING, the five judges’ live scores are revealed after each of the first two rounds before their final verdict is delivered after the third.
That brings with it its own complexities, one of which is that time grinds to a virtual standstill as you’re trying not to get punched in the face by an opponent hellbent on stealing everything from you. “And sure when the bell eventually went, it was almost disbelief then because, like, I knew I’d done it.
Jenny’s older sister Sarah last September won her second ITF world championship, while Jenny herself won European titles in 2018 and 2019 before she found herself being prised away from the family sport. This was not a problem but a pleasure for Lehane, who identifies a causal connection between her career path as a teacher and her being a “sponge” for new information.
But aside from the February midterm and the Easter holidays in 2022, during both of which she was able to train full-time, Lehane was missing out on the bulk of the technical boxing sessions which usually took place in the mornings while she was teaching. “I might have told one person — my boyfriend at home — that maybe I could do this. A few weeks later, I might have mentioned it to my coach . A few weeks after that, I might have let a few more people in on the dream, and it just started to kind of… happen.”
Lehane stresses as well, though, that she’s in a “privileged position” to have been able to park her day job for a couple of years, all the while confident that she can walk back into employment whenever she decides to hang up the gloves. “There’s always going to be children to teach,” she says. That was her parachute.
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