If im going to do it im going to do it 100pc

Olympic hopeful Ceire Smith is a small lady with big dreams, and the heart of a champion. If she makes it all the way to Rio, it will be reward for years of dedication, writes PAUL FITZPATRICK.

She’s heard it all before, and she’s fine with it. A girl, boxing! She laughs, now, at the good of people’s reactions.
A few weeks ago, Ceire Smith returned from the European Games in Azerbaijan and immediately found herself back in the steamy Cavan BC gym at Moynehall.
“A new child started in the club when I was away, a little Traveller kid, and I was just after coming off the plane from Baku, I got the bus from the airport and back to the club. I had a pair of short shorts on me, a sun top, I think I had sunglasses on my head.
“I hadn’t been there in a few weeks because I was training in Dublin. There was this little kid, he must have been no more than 10, he was new. Brian [McKeown] asked me to take the warm-up and this child was looking at me, I don’t know was it disgust, it was sort of like 'who are you, you’re in my gym!’ and I was thinking 'no this is my gym, I just haven’t been here in a month’,” she laughs.
“During the session, I picked up the pads and I asked him was he there long. 'Of course I am,’ he says, 'I’m here a good few weeks’. And he looked at me as if to say 'but you’re not’.
“He didn’t want to do the pads with me and he said 'you’re a girl, you’re not a boxer. And I said 'I am a boxer’. And he said 'well you don’t look like a boxer. What do you know about boxing?’.
“At that moment I just pointed at a poster at the side of his head, one of me holding my belts. And he said 'that’s not you!’ and I said 'it is me!’ so he covered up the name on the poster with his two hands and he goes 'so, what’s your name then?’.
!He moved his hands to look at my name and then just said 'that’s not you’. So I haven’t been back since, he hasn’t seen me training! I didn’t know whether to laugh or be offended, it was really funny.”
That’s been the way since Smith, 22, traded her Redhills camogie stick for a pair of boxing clubs, a fortnight before her 15th birthday. She is the opposite of the lazy stereotype some have of female boxers - an attitude which has been broken down slowly by her friend and High Performance team-mate Katie Taylor.
“Everybody expects a boxer to be a big butch kind of muscular angry person I think, or to have their face mushed. But a lot of people in boxing, the genuine athletes, are the most down to earth people. They’re not rough. Some of them might come from tough backgrounds but they’re very grounded people.”
But while Ceire is petite and bubbly, she readily admits that, in the ring, she’s ruthless. It’s kill or be killed. Does she ever feel sorry for an opponent, tempted to ease off? The answer comes immediately, and with conviction.
“Never. Never. Not at all. Afterwards I’d shake their hands but once I get in the ring, I would say I’m a different person. I’ve always been like that, even in camogie if you ask any of many friends or even my sister, we used to kill each other.
“In a championship, the faster I take them out, the better it looks for me. I don’t want to give them a thought in their head, 'oh she only gave me one count, sure such and such last four rounds with her’.
“No way. If I can take them out in one round, they’re gone. That’s it.”
A couple of days after arriving home from the American bible belt, where she bashed her way to another stash of gold, Smith got the itch again. So, she took off from her home in Mullaloher, Ballyhaise, off running round by Treehoo Cross and up the Bunnoe road. She had a feeling - Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more...
That’s what it takes to compete at the top level.
“Studying [she is doing a sports science degree course in DCU and plans to move to the UK to qualify as a physiotherapist] is a lot of work along with training. I bring the laptop with me when I go abroad.
!I see my own friends in Dublin and they’re athletes but they go to the gym for an hour and stretch and that’s their session done. And they go out that night. You just can’t do that in boxing, I used to get up at six in the morning to train before college and then go the gym again that evening.
“At the end of every night, you’re just wrecked. But that’s what it takes.”
A southpaw, Ceire is heavy-handed for a flyweight. In her first international, she found herself five points down in the final minute and dropped the world-ranked no 3 with one of the best shots of her career and after 18 months plagued by injuries, she can feel that power coming back.
Her best shot is that big left, ideally coming off the back of a feint. Sell the dummy off the right, crank up the left. Boom.
“I’m tall at the weight and everyone else I fight is smaller so I have to be rangy and a bit cuter. The feint is just to throw them off, they think you’re throwing the front hand, maybe a hook, but you completely load on your back hand.
“Your big punchers aren’t big muscly people, they can be too tense and don’t have much movement. The taller, leaner person has better leverage with their body.”
To prepare for the big events, she spars with “the lads”. She’s been in with two-time Olympic medallist Paddy Barnes, has “moved around” with Taylor and has had a few wars with her young clubmate Francis Stokes of late.
It’s only abroad that she can get the competition she needs. And even when a championship is over, fighters stay on and engage in open sparring. Inch by painstaking inch, she builds up that bank of experience.
“Some of them are worse fights. It’s pure aggression, you’re out of the competition, maybe a bit frustrated and it’s absolute war. You make the most of it while you’re there.”
She can still remember her first day in the High Performance gym on Dublin’s South Circular Road. It was the morning after she picked up her Leaving Cert results. That evening, she had stunned Bray’s EU bronze medallist Debbie Rogers in a box-off for the 2010 World Championships in Barbados and was given the message - report to the gym tomorrow morning, 7am.
“I landed at the stadium and the whole men’s team were there and nobody knew I was coming. I remember Zaur Antia saying 'who is this little baby, is she training with us?’.
“But I’m there a good few years now, I’m there every week from Tuesday to Friday and it’s like a big family. You’re only off at Christmas and championships. I wouldn’t say we’re sick of looking at each other but it’s the same people for the last five years. They’re really good characters, they come and cheer me on.
“And they’re honest, you get out and they say 'you did this, this and this wrong’.”
Little milestones. Her first time getting punched in the face stands out, too.
“I started out in Ballinagh in the old hall. My first exhibition was in Leitrim in a community hall against a girl called Amy O’Donnell and I remember I dropped her with the first left hand I threw, the first shot of the fight.
“My second was in the White Horse in Cootehill against Shauna Flynn from Inniskeen, who has since boxed with us. I’ve been away on trips with her and we’re good friends now, she’s 69kg. She gave me my first bloody nose!
“When you first start off, you’re not used to having a head guiard on you and you get phased by it, and your neck muscles aren’t used to it, it’s crazy how easy your head snaps back. I don’t know if it’s a good thing to say I’ve gotten used to it (laughs).
“It’s not sore because your adrenaline is so high, unless it’s an absolute peach of a shot, then you’d see stars. Then it’s the initial shock, 'oh shit, move, defend, I’m in trouble here’. You’d feel it after alright, you’d stiffen up a bit or see a black mark above your eye and say 'oh crap, I didn’t feel that’.
“My first spar was a fella from town here and he would not not hit me. I remember coming forward and then next thing he was in the corner and he had to hit me, bumph! And then I remember Brian laughing and he said 'that’s enough now’. It was the initial shock of it, okay, that’s what it feels like.”
Trading leather has brought this small girl from Cavan a long way, showed her things she otherwise never would have seen. She’s been to Scandinavia, China, the States and all over eastern Europe.
In Baku, she marvelled at the huge, illuminated walls each side of the motorway from the airport. It was only later she learned that they were constructed just to hide the poverty behind them from the athletes and the media. That’s the ugly side to the glamour of the hardest game.
This year, she will defer her studies as she gives it everything - everything - to make the Oympics. After that, she’s not sure what the future holds. She likes life, too, kicking off the tracksuit and partying with her friends, and that can only be put on hold for so long.
“Would I like to try for Tokyo? I don’t know. Our headguards are gone in September, like the men’s. I’ve seen a lot of the guys stitched up in front of me after getting out of the ring - if you’re competing the next day they’ll glue you, if not they’ll stitch the fresh wound up.
“I don’t know about a girl having a horrible cut or scar down their face or across their eye, I think it would put people off boxing.
“That’s one big factor.”
The margins are so fine. The horror and the beauty.
“I’m 23 now in September and I missed the London Olympics by one fight, I had a cast taken off my wrist 10 days before I left. It wasn’t my time but I’m trying as hard as I can for Rio, I’m going to give it 100 per cent. If I do that and don’t make it, I could walk away happy saying I’ve tried everything.
“Somewhere along the line, something has to give. I’m not getting in the ring half-prepared. You get physically stronger and you get more experience, I’m sure you get your face smashed up more, too,” she says wistfully.
“But if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it 100pc. This year I’m focusing totally on boxing - November is the Irish championships, then January in Kazakhstan is the World Championships and I have to finish in the top four Europeans to qualify for Rio.
“Last time, I lost a split decision to the Russian girl and that would have left me in the top four in Europe. It’s all in the draw as well. It’s so close but it’s so far.”
For this champion, that’s what makes it worth doing.