By Hugh Cahill
Paddy Barnes does not owe Ireland anything.
Even after what was a shock defeat against Samuel Carmona Heredia at the Riocentra exhibition centre on Tuesday, the two-time Olympian was admirably honest in his post-fight assessment.
Barnes admitted his struggle to make weight at the punishing 49kg limit and, at 29 years of age, his long-standing battle with the scales had finally taken its toll.
'I had no energy' - A deflated Paddy Barnes reflects on his disappointing Olympic loss to @EvanneNiC #rterio2016 https://t.co/noX3UMXNan
— RTÉ Sport (@RTEsport) August 8, 2016
There were no complaints from the Irish camp when 'El Fierno's' hand (Spanish for 'hell') was raised in victory at the end of the third round.
There was a wonderful irony of Ireland's boxing captain losing out to a 20-year-old with such a nickname: Barnes has been putting his body through hell for over a decade.
Two Olympic medals and three consecutive appearances at the Olympic have not come easy.
Barnes’ career is a tale of personal sacrifice and punishment, the depths of which most of us will never even come close to understanding.
Imagine depriving the body of food and fuel, while simultaneously training and sparring to the intensity levels required to compete - and win - on an international stage?
Consider what it must be like with dehydration dominating every thought in the run-up to a fight, where every drop of sweat lost is another mammoth step towards hitting the goal at the required weight.
And then, in the aftermath of a fight, lacing up that night to make weight again for the following day.
Other sport stars often give out about a six day turn-around, boxers’ entire lives are dominated by the weighing scale.
Michael Conlan has previously attested to the strain that Barnes’ battle with the scales has taken on him over the years.
In the run-up to a fight, his friend would regularly morph into an angry shadow of himself, a bad-tempered loner with no desire for company or small-talk. It wasn't an act.
Barnes regularly went to levels of discomfort that words fail to do justice. But he did it, every time. And he rarely complained.
So, when Barnes suffered what was clearly a difficult and painful defeat in his opening bout, I was disgusted to see a stream of abuse from a bunch of mindless keyboard warriors dominating social media.
“If Barnes trained as much as he tweeted, he would have won.”
“Concentrate on the boxing and not the tweeting Paddy”...etc.
Barnes entertained the entire nation last week in the run-up to the opening ceremony. At a time when most athletes were busy fending off nerves or boredom, Barnes' personality shone through, providing brilliant moments of hilarity and his own take on life inside the Olympic village.
The suggestion by some that his below-par performance on Tuesday is somehow attributable to his Twitter activity last week is incomprehensible.
Barnes probably cares nothing for the trolls, and his career and his achievements to date means he should not even contemplate giving oxygen to these people. In the sometimes sterile, predictable world of elite level sport, where opinions are censored to the point of inertia, Barnes is a welcome relief to the banality that often comes with the territory.
This will be his last and final Olympics and Paddy Barnes will go down as a legend of Irish boxing, a three-time Olympian that did everything the hard way in a sport that only allows the toughest to succeed.
