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.
There remain boxers who prefer to plough through their bout without being informed of the latest tally: why get bogged down in the maths when you’re trying to win every round regardless? They’re content instead to wait for the official announcement, red corner or blue corner when the dust begins to settle.
Jenny Lehane is not one of these boxers. She likes to know precisely the equation into which she enters each time she rises from her stool.
As such, during her final bout at the final Olympic qualifiers in Bangkok earlier this month, the Meath woman entered the final round against Hungary’s Hanna Lakotar armed with the knowledge that she was on her way to Paris provided she didn’t make an absolute hames of the most important three minutes of her life.
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.
“In the back of the mind heading into that last round, I’m like, ‘Oh my God…’ But obviously, I had to hold it together, then!” says Lehane, 25.
“The amount of things that go through your head during a fight is absolutely bizarre. The demons that come out, ‘Am I good enough?’ But positive and negative thoughts in general.
“I’m a round away from qualifying for the Olympics and I’m like, ‘What is going on?’ But you just have to squish it down. There’s another three minutes of fighting that you have to do, like. Anything can happen, whether it be the likes of a count or a warning (point deduction). So, I’m like, ‘I need to put this away for the next three minutes.’
“And sure when the bell eventually went, it was almost disbelief then because, like, I knew I’d done it.
“– Well, I say I knew… I dunno what I was saying to the coaches. I went back over to them and I can’t remember if I was like, ‘I did it!’ or ‘Did I do it?!’ I’m not sure if I was asking them or telling them, to be honest. ‘I did it… Wait, did I?’
“I just had to wait until it was completely official — and then the referee raised my hand into the air. That’s a moment I’ll never forget. It was madness.
“You saw the outpouring of emotion and that was something that had built up during the last few minutes of the fight, the last few weeks of training camp and the last few years of my life.”
Lehane’s journey to this point began as a four-year-old in a separate martial art.
People from their hometown of Ashbourne knew not to mess with the Lehane kids: all six of them — Jenny, her two sisters and her three brothers — practiced taekwondo from an early age. At one point, all eight Lehanes, including parents Pauline and Seamus, were training at the River Valley Taekwondo Club in Swords, north Dublin.
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.
It was soon after that second European success, during her second year studying primary-school teaching at St Pat’s, that Lehane first laced up a pair of boxing gloves.
Remarkably, a decision so incidental at the time could later prove so consequential. Lehane initially joined DCU’s boxing club simply to maintain her fitness during taekwondo’s off-season. Less than five years later, she’s about to become an Olympian in the pastime she took up at the age of 20.
Lehane becomes animated as she relives her first experiences in the boxing gym. “It was just like, ‘There is so much to learn here!’”
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.
Not that she was the perfect taekwondoin, she stresses, but Lehane had spent 16 years honing that particular set of skills. Boxing was a new frontier and she wanted to absorb it all into her brain until it became muscle memory.
In October 2021, soon after squaring off her teaching qualification, Lehane equally sought graduation in the squared circle as she entered the Irish Elite Boxing Championships at 57kg.
“Going into that competition, I was real relaxed, like,” she says. “I was like, ‘Ah, sure nobody knows me here.’ I’d only started boxing a few years previous whereas others would have been training in boxing since they were kids and they would have kind of known of each other growing up.”
Lehane wasn’t long popping up on their radars: she won the whole thing.
She was consequently invited to a couple of weeks’ training with the national High Performance team in Abbotstown. She was given a week off from teaching at her alma mater, St Mary’s Ashbourne, and the second week of training fell during the October midterm.
“And just from day one, I felt, ‘I belong here,’” Lehane says.
She continued to train at the HPU when school resumed in November. For several months, she would drive straight from work to Abbotstown and join Irish sporting legends such as Kellie Harrington and coach Zaur Antia for the second training session of the day, which was typically S&C.
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.
“And the S&C sessions were obviously beneficial”, Lehane says, “but at the same time, you can do S&C in any gym, anywhere. What I really needed was the elite boxing training.”
The lightbulb went off when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced in April of that year that Lehane’s optimal weight class, 54kg, would be included for the first time at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“It started off as a thought in the back of my mind and it just kept growing bigger and bigger. ‘The Olympics.’
“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 (Derek Ahern). 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.”
In a sense, Lehane talked that dream into existence. In relaying it out loud to loved ones, she had moved towards the aircraft door.
“One. Hundred. Percent. I was just waiting for somebody to tell me I was crazy: ‘Nah, don’t do that!’” Lehane laughs. “But nobody did.”
And so followed the leap of faith.
It’s funny, the day I qualified in Bangkok, the one memory that just kept coming into my head that day — and I don’t know why, but I couldn’t stop it — was the day I went down to the principal in St Mary’s, Ashbourne. It was probably May or June 2022 and I was only figuring out jobs and positions and everything else. And eventually, I was just like, ‘D’you know what…?’ I went down and said to Mr Paul O’Connor, ‘Just to let you know, I won’t be looking for another job here in September. I’m gonna try and get to the Olympics.’
“Even saying that out loud…” Lehane laughs. “Now, looking back, I’d say he was like, ‘This one’s mad. I’ll see her next year.’
Instead, Mr O’Connor and the rest of the staff and students from St Mary’s will cheer on Ms Lehane when she represents Ireland in Paris this summer, a concept which still feels “bizarre” for the boxer herself.
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.
She has a safety net, too, in the shape of “a great family, a great boyfriend at home, and people who support me,” she says.
“And what all of that has allowed me to do with this boxing journey is just to enjoy it.
“In 20 years’ time, I don’t want to look back on this as being a terrible time,” Lehane adds. “I want to be able to look back and know that I gave it my all, but while also enjoying myself.”
Five weeks out, now, it’s starting to feel real more often than it feels abstract or insane: Jenny Lehane is going to be an Olympian.
It’s only when she pops back to her mum’s house in Ashbourne for lunch between morning and evening sessions, encountering people who continue to congratulate her on her qualification, that Lehane is forced to pinch herself. “‘Oh God, yeah. Is this real?’”
There is one way with which she’ll be able to prove to herself in 20 years that it wasn’t all a fever dream, of course.
“I always told people that if I ever qualified for the Olympics, I’d get the rings tattooed on my forehead so that everyone could see!” Lehane laughs. “Now that I’ve done it, I might have to change my mind.”
Jenny Lehane can take a step back from the aircraft door this time around. Indeed, she can take her seat and embrace the descent towards Charles de Gaulle Airport.
