![\"Ireland's](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/7dcebe74-cf25-402d-9681-ff080e62c8b7.jpg\")
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Ireland’s Kellie Harrington celebrates with her lightweight boxing gold medal at the Paris Olympics<\/p>\n
Two-time Olympic champion Kellie Harrington is coming out of retirement and is keeping an open mind about targeting a run at the Los Angeles Games in 2028.<\/p>\n
The 35-year-old boxer announced she was hanging up her gloves after winning a second Olympic title in Paris last year, but now plans to return to the ring, with her first comeback fight set to be in an exhibition bout in the Mansion House on December 2. Her first major target will be the national championships in January.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter the Olympics, I just announced my retirement,” said the lightweight boxer in an interview with the Irish Times. \u201cBut that\u2019s the good thing about life, we\u2019re allowed to make our minds up, we\u2019re allowed to change them again and make it back up and change it again.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll be 36 in December. So, why not? I\u2019m saying nothing about the [next] Olympics or anything like that. Everybody knows me. I\u2019ll never say anything about winning or going to the Olympics. I always look at one fight at a time, one competition at a time. And that\u2019s exactly what I\u2019m doing.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I do just think, imagine if I didn\u2019t give it another go. I\u2019m fit, I\u2019m kind of healthy. I have a few niggles at the moment but in general I\u2019m healthy. So why wouldn\u2019t I?\u201d<\/p>\n
Harrington, the 11-time national champion, has kept in shape and revealed that she travelled to the World Championships in Liverpool where she sparred with some of the competitors.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve had more than a year and I\u2019ve had time to reflect on why I actually started boxing in the first place,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was to get me out of the hole, the wrong road that I was going down. And I\u2019ve had time to reminisce on how I felt when I started boxing first and how I want that feeling again.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland’s Kellie Harrington celebrates with her lightweight boxing gold medal at the Paris Olympics Two-time Olympic champion Kellie…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":144203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[18,19,17,84999,132],"class_list":{"0":"post-144202","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-kellie-harrington","12":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115433503842697378","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}