Katie Taylor’s groundbreaking career ended on a grand stage as she defeated Flora Pili in front of a sellout crowd in Croke Park.
Almost 25 years after fighting in the first officially sanctioned female fight on Irish soil, Taylor became the first boxer to headline a fight night at GAA headquarters since Muhammad Ali in 1972.
A fantastical farewell to match so much else about Taylor’s singular career.
At around 10pm, Taylor strode out into the arena, walking around in front of the Canal End as a thousand camera phones were held aloft. She strode towards the ring accompanied by a song called ‘All Hail King Jesus’.
The fight had been assumed beforehand to be a formality and it was relatively comfortable throughout for Taylor, whose footwork and hand speed were on a different level to her opponent.
Her French opponent Pili had amassed an unbeaten record in 12 professional encounters, though most of those had been in her hometown in the east of France and she was unused to an occasion of this magnitude.
She was crouched in a defensive pose for the opening three rounds, forcing Taylor to come out on the attack.
The first round was a scoping out affair, with little in the way of frenzied action. The former Olympic champion began to dominate more in the second and third rounds, winning them easily.
Pili came out of her shell more in the fourth round and this suited Taylor all the more. Routinely, Taylor caught the challenger with a few quick shots before dodging shots on the counter-attack.
Already needing a miracle of sorts, Pili was more assertive and dangerous in Round 7, catching Taylor with a big head shot which rocked her momentarily.
It was a temporary hiccup and Taylor avoided any serious trouble in Rounds 8 and 9 as Pili began swinging wildly in Hail Mary fashion.
The fight finished in a whirl of punches as Taylor and Pili swung away manically at each other before the bell – before embracing at the finish. The French woman looked pretty content to have lasted until the finish.
There was little anxiety as the scores were announced, either on Taylor’s face or among the crowd, with all three judges scoring it heavily in her favour – two seeing it 100-90 and the third 98-91.
Afterwards, she grabbed the microphone to thank everyone who’d helped her along the way – with her father getting a special shout-out for his impact on mainstreaming women’s boxing in Ireland. It was certainly never more mainstream than it was tonight.
It will hardly go down as the most dramatic or tension-laden fights of Taylor’s career.
But the contest itself was largely an afterthought on a night which was a celebration of one of the most remarkable athletes in the history of the island.
The undercard had been at times entertaining, at times fairly surreal affair. Limerick’s Paddy Donovan impressed again with a comfortable demolition of Tyrone McKenna, the fight being halted late in the fourth round on the advice of the doctors.
Former Olympian Emmett Brennan suffered his first defeat in professional ranks, being knocked down six times by English-born Welsh boxer Taylor Bevan in a bout which lasted a couple of rounds longer than it should have.
Most bizarre was the penultimate fight of the night between Dubliner Thomas Carty and his Yorkshire opponent Dave Allen, which ended after 82 seconds with Carty falling through the ropes and tumbling out of the ring after being hit on the back of the head. After a lengthy wait in which Allen looked bemused, the fight was deemed a no-contest.