Punching Above their Weight: The Irish Olympic Boxing Story

Prologue

The recent construction in Abbotstown, west Dublin, of a €3.5 million purpose-built training centre and accommodation block for Ireland’s Elite boxers is a belated but fitting testimonial to the country’s most successful Olympic sport.

Finally, twelve years after its establishment by the Irish Amateur Boxing Association (IABA), the High Performance Unit (HPU) has a facility worthy of its cohort of world-class boxers. HPU coaches have trained Irish boxers to win a total of 241 medals in championships at all levels, up to the end of June 2015, resulting in the unit earning the moniker ‘The Medal Factory’.

The taxpayer picked up the tab for the cost of this new, much-needed and long-awaited facility. The IABA hasn’t always been so fortunate. Shortly before the start of the Second World War in 1939, Ireland hosted the fifth European Boxing Championships in the IABA’s magnificent new headquarters on Dublin’s South Circular Road which was built without any financial aid from the government, though they did donate the site.

The organisation, which was just over a quarter of a century in existence at the time, showed remarkable foresight and considerable self-confidence in erecting its own HQ, which they simply named the National Stadium. In 1935, the IABA had taken a lead role in organising a meeting of other sports organisations to look into the possibility of building a national sports stadium. All the organisations supported the idea in principle but none were willing to commit to raising the necessary finance. Undeterred, the IABA pressed on with this ambitious project, even though it would cost more than one million euro in today’s money to complete.

The heroine of the project was Mrs Mary Murphy, wife of Major General William Richard English-Murphy, the then president of the IABA and arguably the most influential figure in Irish boxing for the first half of the twentieth century. It has been estimated that she personally raised £3,000 – the equivalent of €240,000 in today’s money – through the organisation of carnivals and garden parties for the project.

The National Stadium opened its doors for the first time in March 1939 when it hosted the National Senior Championships. A month later, a sell-out crowd of over two thousand crowded into the arena to see two Dubliners, seventeen-year-old Jimmy Ingle and his teammate Paddy Dowdall, win gold medals in the flyweight and featherweight categories respectively, while welterweight Charlie Evenden claimed a bronze at the European Championships.

They were the first medals won by Irish boxers representing Ireland in international championships. The next official European Championships were not held until after the war. Again they were hosted by the IABA in the National Stadium in 1947 when heavyweight Gearóid O Colmáin won gold and featherweight Peter Maguire landed silver. Five years later, bantamweight John McNally secured Ireland’s first Olympic boxing medal at the Helsinki Games. The bold decision to build the National Stadium was the catalyst for the first golden era in Irish boxing.

Arguably, the current golden era in Irish amateur boxing was precipitated by the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the break-up of the Soviet Union two years later. Its dissolution resulted in the creation of fifteen new countries, and seven more states came into existence when Yugoslavia broke up in 1992.

European politics, sport and in particular, boxing, would never be the same again. The rules of engagement had changed dramatically. Irish boxing was ill-prepared for the tsunami which all but wiped out the country’s reputation as a respected boxing nation.

This is the story of how that reputation was not only painstakingly restored but embellished way beyond peoples’ imaginations.

Chapter 1

Building the Tradition

‘He [Jake Corvino] was a good-looking guy, but he was the hardest man I ever fought. Once I beat him, I wasn’t afraid of anyone.’

John McNally

Eight of Ireland’s fifteen Olympic boxing medallists hail from Belfast, bolstering the argument that the city is the spiritual home of the sport in this country. John McNally was the pioneer, fashioning a historic breakthrough at the Helsinki Olympic Games in 1952, when he became the first ever Irish boxer to win an Olympic medal. He minted silver; by all accounts, it ought to have been gold.

His breakthrough marked a watershed moment in the evolution of Irish sport. Until then, athletics was Ireland’s showcase event on the world stage. Pat O’Callaghan was crowned Olympic hammer champion in 1928 and 1932, when Bob Tisdall also won the 400-metre hurdles. The new Irish Free State was represented in four sports at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris: athletics, water polo, lawn tennis, and a seven-man boxing team, six of whom were members of the Irish army. The exception was bantamweight Robert Hilliard, a Trinity College student. He hailed from Moyeightragh, near Killarney, was a founder member of the college’s hurling club and fought on the Republican side in the Civil War. Later he worked as a journalist before being ordained a Church of Ireland minister. He subsequently resigned from his ministry, immigrated to London, and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was killed in 1937 while fighting with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

At the Paris Games, Thurles-born Paddy ‘Rocky’ Dwyer became the first Irish boxer to record a win at Olympic level when he beat Great Britain’s Joseph J ‘Johnny’ Basham in the preliminary round of the welterweight category. He followed on with wins over Ko Cornelissen (the Netherlands) and Théodore Stauffer (Switzerland) before being stopped in the third round of the semi-final by Argentinian Héctor Méndez. There was controversy surrounding the fight. The Irish camp contended that Méndez should have been disqualified for deliberately headbutting Dwyer, which resulted in a nasty cut on his brow and effectively ended his involvement in the Games.

Prior to the 1952 Games, semi-finalists who lost had to box off for bronze. Thirty-year-old Dwyer, who had learned to box while serving in the British army, had to concede a walkover in the box-off to Douglas Lewis from Canada due to his head wound. Under current rules he would have been guaranteed a bronze medal.

Four years later, at the Amsterdam Games, Dwyer was the official trainer of the eight-man Irish team, three of whom came from the ranks of the Gardaí and two from the Irish army. This time around it was Dubliner Frank Traynor who was the luckless one. He was disqualified by British referee GH Chandley during the bantamweight semi-final against Italian Vittorio Tamagnini – the eventual gold medallist. Irish journalist AP McWeeney, who was ringside, reported that there was ‘no cause’ for the decision. Following a protest by the Olympic Council of Ireland, Traynor was reinstated. However, he was not permitted to re-box the Italian. He lost to Harry Isaacs from South Africa in the box-off for the bronze medal.

Only four Irish boxers competed at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. Three failed to win their opening bouts, but light-heavyweight James Murphy, a member of the Gardaí, beat John Miler from the USA in the quarter-finals. Unfortunately, he was forced to withdraw from both his semi-final against Gino Rossi (Italy) and a box-off for the bronze medal with Denmark’s Peter Jørgensen due to injury.

Ireland did not compete at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and the outbreak of the Second World War caused the cancellation of the 1940 Games. By the time the Olympics resumed in London in 1948, Ireland had established itself as a significant power in boxing at European level.

Dublin hosted the European Amateur Boxing Championships in 1939 in the newly-opened National Stadium – the first purpose-built boxing arena in the world. The Irish team finished second behind Italy in the medals table after seventeen-year-old Jimmy Ingle (flyweight) and Paddy Dowdall (featherweight) won gold medals, while welterweight Charles Evenden secured a bronze. The National Stadium again hosted the European Championships in 1947 and Ireland finished third overall with two medals: gold for Gearóid Ó Colmáin in the heavyweight division and silver for featherweight Peter Maguire.

Maguire didn’t make the eight-man team for London, where the boxing took place on a temporary bridge laid out over the Empire Pool at Wembley. Ó Colmáin, a Dublin-based blacksmith, was beaten in the first round by Italian Uber Baccilieri, but Mullingar lightweight Michael ‘Maxie’ McCullagh underlined his potential by reaching the quarter-finals. Middleweight Mick McKeon, a twenty-five-year-old plumber from Dublin, was the unlucky Irish fighter. Having defeated Canadian and Iranian opponents, he beat the defending European champion, Frenchman Aimé Escudie, in the quarter-final. But, later on the same day, he lost to England’s John ‘Johnny’ A Wright in the semi-final. There was outrage in the Irish media about the decision. Writing in The Irish Press, Dick Wilkes was apoplectic:

‘Mick McKeon whacked the British champion, Johnny Wright, in the Olympic at Wembley, London yesterday, and by rights should be the first Irishman ever to contest the final of an Olympic championship today. But he won’t. Through one of the greatest pieces of boxing injustices I have ever seen, he was not given the verdict against the Britisher and now joins the ranks of boxers from all over the world who have been robbed of the decision they earned and richly deserved.’

Ireland lodged an official protest, though other countries took more drastic action when they were the victims of dodgy decisions. Argentinian officials stormed the judges’ tables, while France withdrew their boxers, and their international president resigned. Just to compound McKeon’s misery, he had to withdraw from the box-off for the bronze medal after the medical officer advised him not to box due to a broken nose. In fact, McKeon had broken his nose in training before the Olympics started but had battled through four fights despite the obvious discomfort. Wright was beaten in the Olympic final by the famous Hungarian southpaw László Papp, the first boxer to win three successive Olympic gold medals.

But there was one positive outcome – for all boxers. The injury-enforced withdrawal of McKeon, American lightweight Wallace Smith – a future world professional champion – and Swiss heavyweight Hans Mueller led to both beaten semi-finalists getting bronze medals from the following Games onward. According to boxing historian and writer Gerry Callan, the fact that three boxers at the one Games lost the chance of fighting for a medal through no fault of their own made the authorities realise the unfairness of the rule.

The eighth European Championships held in Oslo in 1949 were significant insofar as they were the last in which Russian boxers did not compete. Irish featherweight David O’Connell was awarded a bronze medal by the jury – he had lost to the eventual winner Jacques Bataille in the semi-final. Maxie McCullagh was the Irish hero, however, as he was crowned European light champion. Forty-two years would pass before another Irish boxer would win a European title.

John McNally’s silver medal in 1952 launched boxing on a journey which has seen it becoming Ireland’s pin-up sport at Olympic level. Since then, Irish boxers have won sixteen Olympic medals, whereas all the other sports combined have accumulated just nine. Athletic aficionados will argue that they have won four gold medals compared to just two in boxing, but the overall trend is undeniable. Furthermore, only three of the six athletic medals have been won post 1932, whereas all of the boxing medals have come since 1952.

Nowadays octogenarian McNally makes the daily commute by bus from his home in south Belfast into the city centre, where he regularly reminisces with his boxing acquaintances in the Grapevine Café. Born in Cinnamon Street, situated in the city’s Pound Loney area, he can recall an era when the nearby Falls Road was dotted with flax mills. His formative years were dominated by the Second World War. He was nine when, on Easter Tuesday night, 15 April 1941, two hundred bombers from the Luftwaffe attacked the city. The toll was horrendous: 900 people died, while another 1,500 were injured, and half the houses in the city were damaged or destroyed.

‘I don’t remember being afraid. Our neighbourhood wasn’t hit, though the other side of the Falls Road was badly damaged. I remember the sirens going off. We would either hide under the stairs or assemble in a nearby park.’

His abiding memory of the war years is of his father, George, being forced to go to England to find work to support his family. ‘He wasn’t away all the time but it was very rough when he had to leave.’

McNally was introduced to boxing by a friend who told him about a new club which was opening near his home in Devonshire Street. The pair headed off one evening to the new Immaculata Club. Kitted out with their new boxing gloves, they were sent into battle against each other. ‘I’d say we were about twelve at the time, and we proceeded to knock hell out of each other. My friend never came back but I was hooked from day one.’

Even though he was 5’9" in height and his chest measured forty inches, his waist was a mere twenty-seven inches so he was able to make the 54 kg bantamweight limit. His gruelling schedule kept his weight in check. He ran ten miles every morning, then enjoyed a breakfast which consisted of a big bap and a mug of tea. He did ninety minutes training in the club every night – and in between he served his time as a motor mechanic.

He was just nineteen when he won his first Irish title in 1952. Even though the victory put him on course for the Olympics, some selectors thought he was too fragile. As ever, the politics surrounding team selection was simmering underneath the surface. It was suggested that a more experienced bantamweight, Dubliner Paddy Kelty – who won the Irish title in 1951 but didn’t box in the championships the following year – would be a more suitable candidate. Furthermore, Kelty was a member of the Corinthians Boxing Club, a number of whose members were reputed to be influential figures in the higher echelons of the Irish Amateur Boxing Association (IABA).

According to McNally, his coach ‘Wee’ Sammy Wallace ‘was years ahead of his time’. Together they set out to prove the pundits wrong. In the annual Kuttner Shield international against Scotland, he beat an experienced opponent, Tom Beattie. Next up was a show between Ireland and the New York Golden Gloves champions.

His opponent was a first generation Italian-American, Jake Corvino. He had only taken up boxing the previous year when he heard that the winners of the New York Golden Gloves championship would be visiting Italy on a European tour in 1952. He figured it was the only chance he’d ever get to visit his grandparents. McNally remembers, ‘He was a good-looking guy, but he was the hardest man I ever fought. Once I beat him, I wasn’t afraid of anyone.’

Nevertheless, McNally still faced a box-off against Kelty. The Belfast boxer prevailed to secure his place on the team for Helsinki. He was joined by the Reddy brothers, Andrew ‘Ando’ (flyweight) and Tommy (featherweight); Kevin Martin (lightweight); Terry Milligan (light welterweight); Peter Crotty (welterweight); Willie Duggan (middleweight) and John Lyttle (heavyweight). Seventeen-year-old Harry Perry was left at home even though he had beaten Tommy Reddy in the Irish featherweight Elite final; he was considered too young.

There were no collective training camps in those days. ‘I was working up until the day before I left,’ recalls McNally. The journey to the Finnish capital proved something of an epic trip, lasting two days by trains and boats. ‘A donkey and cart would have been faster.’

Listening to John McNally, it is evident that the Helsinki Games left an indelible mark on him. He loved athletics nearly as much as boxing and he spent every spare minute in the Olympic Stadium. Czech army officer Emil Zátopek dominated the Games. He fashioned an unprecedented treble, winning the 5,000 metres, the 10,000 metres, and the marathon – a feat which is unlikely to be ever attempted in modern times, never mind equalled. ‘I saw him running,’ says McNally, ‘but didn’t realise how good he was.’ The presence of the first-ever team from the Soviet Union at the Olympic Games also caused a stir, though there was minimal contact with their athletes outside of the competition as they insisted on being housed separately.

The American boxing team, which included seventeen-year-old Floyd Patterson, who later became the youngest world professional heavyweight champion until Mike Tyson, took a shine to McNally and took him under their wing.

‘The authorities wanted us to train at night. We kicked up hell and got a slot between the Americans and the Canadians. I always sparred with my teammate Terry Milligan from Belfast. Regardless of what the Americans were doing, they always came to watch and that’s how they adopted me.’

McNally convincingly beat Alejandro Ortuoste from the Philippines in his first fight to earn a quarter-final clash against Italian Vincenzo Dall’osso.

Meanwhile, Milligan also advanced to the quarter-finals but lost to Italian Bruno Visintin. John McNally went on to make history in his quarter-final, beating the reigning European champion to secure Ireland’s first ever Olympic medal in boxing and the country’s first medal in any sport for twenty years.

Now the youngster was on a roll. He turned bronze to silver as he beat Korean Kang Joon-ho in the semi-final. Again, it was a unanimous 3-0 verdict, his third in a row.

‘He was a nut case to fight but I won very easy,’ remembers McNally. ‘However, my back was a mess afterwards [from rope burns], and the Americans grabbed me and took me to their dressing room. Two of their boxers, Charles Chuck Adkins and Patterson were inside preparing for their fights. Their doctor asked them to hold my hands while he poured alcohol on my back. Boy, did it hurt.’

Adkins and Patterson later won the middleweight and light welterweight titles respectively, but their new Irish friend was not so fortunate. Ominously for the Irish camp, bantamweight Pentti Hämäläinen was the only Finnish boxer to reach the finals; four others bowed out in the semi-finals.

The dreams of the host nation rested on the slight frame of a twenty-three-year-old typewriter mechanic and, of course, the judges. So even before McNally stepped into the ring on 2 August 1952, the odds were stacked against the Irish teenager. ‘I loved my first three fights. But in the final all Pentti did was to hang on. He even opened up a cut near my eye with his head. He was warned at least eight times but never lost a point,’ says a wistful McNally. ‘My own corner thought I had won; so did the Americans. It took the judges a long time to come to their decision. I was thinking if I won, why the hold up?’

When the decision was announced, the partisan crowd erupted. It mattered little that it was a split 2-1 decision. The British judge gave the nod to McNally, but the Austrian and American judges backed the local champion. McNally can afford to be philosophical about it all now. ‘The result didn’t bother me, it bothered other people.’

At the time, the newly-proclaimed Republic of Ireland was still something of an enigma to the outside world. McNally learned that the Olympic officials had planned to play the British army marching song ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ as the Irish anthem at the medal ceremony.

Back in Ireland there was scant media coverage of the historic breakthrough, though it was a major talking point among the boxing fraternity, according to veteran commentator Jimmy Magee. ‘It created a big stir, though the success didn’t get a great deal of column inches.’

McNally was puzzled when his father insisted he stay in Dublin for a few days after the Irish team’s arrival home. This was to allow his father time to organise a homecoming in Belfast, where, despite the pouring rain, thousands turned out to greet the boxer.

Politics, though, was to rear its ugly head. McNally was to be honoured by the civil authorities at a film premiere in the Ritz Cinema. He tells of how ‘The Lord Mayor couldn’t be bothered to come so I got the High Sheriff instead. I was wearing my Irish team blazer which had a tricolour emblem on it. The High Sheriff refused to join me on the stage unless I took off my jacket. My trainer didn’t want a confrontation and I was so naïve that I took it off. I’d never do it again.’

The irony of the incident was lost on those who created the fuss. The film being premiered was Jim Thorpe – All-American, the dramatized story of the US athlete of mixed ancestry who won the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games. Later, he was shamefully disqualified and stripped of his titles when it was discovered he was paid a pittance for playing two seasons of semi-professional baseball. Thirty years after his death the International Olympic Committee (IOC) restored his medals.

At the 1953 European Championships in Warsaw, McNally, despite struggling to make the weight at bantam, won a bronze medal, while his sparring partner, light welterweight Terence Milligan, took silver. This effectively brought the curtain down on McNally’s amateur career, in which he only lost 6 of his 314 fights. His last amateur fight was on a Corinthians show in the National Stadium on 29 January 1954 when he was outpointed by none other than Pentti Hämäläinen.

McNally recalls the build-up to the rematch. ‘I had been ill with blood poisoning beforehand and was in hospital. I was urged by people around home not to take the fight, but a friend of mine, Colm Gallagher who was a TD in Dublin, arranged for Pentti to travel over so I agreed to it.’

Later that year, McNally turned professional, but he did not enjoy the progame and quit the ring in 1961 at the age of twenty-eight after just twenty-five fights. ‘I hated every minute of professional boxing because of the gangsters who hung around the sport. All they wanted was money.’

John McNally went on to become a professional musician with the folk group ‘The Freemen’. The esteem with which he is regarded in his native Belfast was underlined in 2013 when his Olympic medal was stolen. Following a public appeal, it was handed in to the UTV offices in the city.

At the 1955 European Championships in Berlin, six of the Irish team were defeated in the first round. Light middleweight Peter Burke advanced to the quarter-final, where he lost to the eventual bronze medallist Rolf Caroli from East Germany. So there were few reasons for believing that the seven-man boxing team chosen to compete at the Melbourne Olympic Games in 1956 would go down in history as the most successful ever male team in the history of the sport.

Ireland was an austere place in the mid-fifties. It has been estimated that between 1956 and 1961 more than 40,000 people emigrated. Money was tight and sending a team of athletes to the other side of the world was not a top priority. Ronnie Delany, who won the 1500 metres in Melbourne, scraped through the selection process by one vote, while high jumper Brendan O’Reilly, though selected, did not travel due to a shortfall of £1,000 in the Olympic Council of Ireland’s £8,000 budget. With his bags packed in Michigan where he was in college, he received a curt two-word telegram from the OCI, ‘Trip cancelled’.

The people of Drogheda came together to organise a special collection to ensure that their local hero Tony ‘Socks’ Byrne could make the trip. ‘Everyone in the town threw their weight behind the fund-raising effort,’ recalled Byrne in an interview with author Barry Flynn in Irish Boxing Legends. A sum of £653 was raised.

Belfast bantamweight Freddie Gilroy, a late addition to the team, also had to depend on public donations. But it was his weight, rather than finance, which nearly derailed Gilroy’s Olympic ambitions. Born in the Short Strand area of east Belfast, his family moved to Ardoyne in north Belfast, where he joined the St John Bosco Club in Corporation Street. In May 1956 he toured the US and Canada with an Irish boxing squad which fashioned a memorable 5-5 draw against a Golden Gloves squad in Chicago. In Irish Boxing Legends Gilroy recalled how he decided to weigh himself at New York airport on the way home, ‘The scales showed I was heading for two stone overweight.’ The word got back to the OCI and it looked as if he wouldn’t be selected. In the ensuing controversy, Gilroy insisted that even if the scales were accurate, losing two stone wouldn’t be an issue. Eventually, he was added to the squad.

The other team members were John Caldwell, Fred Tiedt, Harry Perry and Martin Smyth. Donegal native Pat Sharkey, a former Irish junior champion and Scottish senior champion, who was working on the Snowy Mountain hydro-electric dam project in New South Wales, was added to the team. Christy Murphy, who had managed the team in Helsinki, was in charge again. But he fell ill on the journey, was diagnosed with thrombosis and spent the duration of the Games in a Melbourne hospital. Former Australian professional Snowy Sullivan, who had little knowledge of the Irish boxers, assumed Murphy’s coaching duties, while Martin Power, a former Irish junior champion, then working in Melbourne, assisted the team in a voluntary capacity. Nonetheless, the Irish boxers trained hard once they reached Australia, according to accounts by Fred Tiedt.

In Irish Olympians he explained their routine. ‘We bloody well trained, I’ll tell you. We’d go down to the beach for a run in the morning. Then in the afternoon we’d train again. Then we’d do loose sparring with some professionals over there – we murdered them.’ Even though China, Spain, Holland, Egypt, and Iraq withdrew their teams as a result of the Hungarian uprising and the Suez crisis, all the then leading boxing nations sent their pugilists to battle in the Western Melbourne Hall.

On the first day featherweight Martin Smyth lost to a familiar opponent. Eight years after he had beaten McNally in the Olympic bantamweight final, Finland’s Pentti Hämäläinen, now operating in the featherweight division, ended Smyth’s ambitions. The Finn went on to capture a bronze medal. Heavyweight Pat Sharkey was knocked out in round three of his preliminary bout by a Swedish opponent, Thorner Ahsman, while light welterweight Harry Perry was beaten by Claude Saluden from France. Neither Ahsman nor Saluden medalled.

It was Gilroy, the late addition to the team, who grabbed the headlines when he knocked out gold-medal favourite and European silver medallist Boris Stepanov from the USSR.

‘I caught him with a sweet left hook in the third round, over he went and I knew he was not getting up,’ recalled Gilroy in Legends of Irish Boxing.

The reaction of the crowd and the subsequent unprecedented media coverage underlined how the Games and politics are intertwined. Throughout the Western world anti-Soviet sentiment was rife at the time, in the wake of the USSR’s invasion and brutal suppression of the Hungarian uprising the previous month. Gilroy had no interest in politics but he understood the political significance of the win. ‘This was one in the eye for the Russians,’ he suggested.

There was an ironic twist to Gilroy’s story before the end of the Games. He outpointed Italian Mario Sitri to guarantee himself a bronze medal and a semi-final clash against a highly rated East German bantamweight, Wolfgang Behrendt. The fight was refereed by a Russian official, Andrey Timoshin. Most observers felt Gilroy did enough to win. The judges were split evenly on the verdict which left the Irishman’s fate in the hands of the Russian referee. He raised the arm of Behrendt, who later won the gold medal.

In the lightweight category, Tony Byrne’s first opponent, Josef Chovanec from Czechoslovakia, was disqualified in the third round after receiving a third warning for his illegal tactic of charging headlong into the Irishman. In his bronze medal fight against American Luis Molina, Byrne – who had a reputation as a heavy puncher – delivered three devastating early punches, two to the head and one to the body, which effectively decided the fight in his favour. He won it on a unanimous decision: 60-58, 60-58, and 60-57. Ultimately, Byrne had to be content with a bronze medal – he lost on points to West Germany’s Harry Kurschat, who was then defeated by Great Britain’s Dick McTaggart in the final. The latter was awarded the prestigious Val Barker trophy after being adjudged the Best Boxer in the tournament. Sixty days later, Byrne stunned the audience in London’s Royal Albert Hall when he outpointed McTaggart in an international between the two countries.

Caldwell also ended up with a bronze medal in the flyweight division. Having received a bye in the first round, the Belfast man knocked out Burmese boxer, Yai Shwe in the third round of their last sixteen contest. In the quarter-final he faced local hero Warren Batchelor, who was the favourite to win the gold medal. But Caldwell prevailed on a unanimous points decision. At eighteen years and 205 days he remains Ireland’s youngest ever Olympic medallist – in any sport. The victory came at a cost, however. His eyes were badly swollen and he had only forty-eight hours to recover before the semi-final. Just over two hours before he was due in the ring, the doctor declared him unfit to fight for the silver medal.

‘I’ll never forget John’s reaction,’ recalled Martin Power in the Setanta documentary Tales from a Neutral Corner. ‘There were tears coming out of his eyes even though they were closed.’ Power grabbed Caldwell’s towel and went outside where he found a street vendor selling bottles of Coca-Cola. ‘I gave her fifty pence and she filled the towel with ice. I spent the next two hours applying the ice to John’s face in an effort to reduce the swelling.’

Caldwell was passed fit to box but lost to the experienced Romanian Mircea Dobrescu, who was subsequently defeated in the final.

But it is the name of another Romanian boxer, welterweight Nicolae Linca which remains etched in the Irish sporting psyche. Fred Tiedt dreamed about boxing in the Olympics from the age of eleven. He applied himself to the task with unusual diligence once he joined a boxing club in 1950. He would rise at 5am to do a six-mile run, followed by abdominal exercises, and then on to his job as a carpenter. His commitment paid off in Melbourne. Like his colleagues, Tiedt had no prior knowledge of any of his opponents. He went in ‘cold’ to all his contests. ‘But if you see a lad who is not marked and he is champion of his country, you say to yourself, this guy can box,’ Tiedt revealed in Irish Olympians.

He beat a Pole, Tadeusz Walasek, in the first round to earn a bronze medal bout against American Pearce Lane. Instead of using the double jab, which he deployed against the Pole, the Irishman rocked the American with hooks to the body and won comfortably. For the first and only time in the country’s boxing history Ireland qualified four boxers for the Olympic semi-finals. Twenty-year-old Tiedt was the only one of the quartet to reach the final, though. His opponent, Kevin Hogarth was the last Australian boxer left in the tournament. Tiedt knew he needed to win well. In the event, Hogarth couldn’t get near his elusive opponent, who had established his reputation in Ireland as a brilliant counter-puncher. Tiedt cruised to a comfortable points win. All the controversy was in the other semi-final, where Linca got a questionable decision over European champion Nicky Gargano from Great Britain.

Saturday, 1 December 1956 was a momentous day in Irish sport. At the Melbourne Cricket Ground twenty-one-year-old Ronnie Delany surprised everybody by winning the gold medal in the 1500 metres. A few hours later, the attention switched to the West Melbourne Stadium for the boxing finals. A southpaw, Linca struggled to cope with Tiedt. As the fight progressed, the Romanian appeared to wilt and, noticeably, in the third round started to make mistakes. When the final bell sounded, everybody assumed that an Irishman would be crowned Olympic welterweight champion.

‘I thought I was the clear winner. Everyone was jumping on me saying well done. I said to myself, wait, wait, wait,’ recalled Tiedt in Irish Olympians. Likewise, the then president of the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI) Lord Killanin was sounding caution when his fellow officials were urging him to go down to ringside to present the gold medal to his fellow Irishman. When it was announced, the decision shocked the majority of the 7,000 fans in the arena. Linca was awarded the fight on a 3-2 split decision. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ said Tiedt, and neither could the crowd, who greeted it with a chorus of boos and whistles.

It only emerged later how unfortunate the Irish boxer had been. Two of the judges, an Italian (A Gilardi) and an East German (H Hertel) gave Tiedt the verdict on a 60-58 score. This meant that in their view Tiedt won two of the rounds while the other was tied. However, the Polish judge (J Neuding) opted for his fellow Eastern European 60-59, which in layman’s terms translated to two rounds drawn with Linca winning the other.

His decision would not have mattered but for the fact that the other two judges, a Korean (SJ Chuu) and a Brit (H Hedger) scored the fight 60-60 – essentially they judged that all three rounds were level. But both of them opted to give the nod to Linca which gave him a 3-2 majority. Overall, Tiedt secured three more points (229 to 226) than his opponent but still lost.

The verdict provoked an outcry in the international media. Nat Fleischer, the renowned boxing author and editor of The