Gary Keegan

to training environments across the world with a video camera, literally video and everything they were doing.

So we were, you know, it was a fancy term now, we were stealing intelligence from the opposition and they weren't looking and they weren't paying attention to us.

And we, over the course of, I'd say about three and a half years performance,

grew.

I remember speaking to the media in the first year and saying, guys, look, we're not going to be achieving major medals in year one, year two.

You have to assess us on performance improvement.

I said, and we will progress.

We graduated the competitions that we were going into to try and build a level of success and build a level of confidence and belief that the athletes could perform and achieve at that level.

And

so we've done some pretty innovative uh things at that time and we got right into sports science you know we we and we didn't jump in and take everything on to begin with we brought a physio in johnson mcavoy we said okay we're breaking down with soft tissue injuries all the time can you have a look and tell us what you think and he felt that he felt that the boxers weren't robust enough physically

to be able to take on full-time training.

And so then we hired an SSC coach and then we kind of built the team.

Nutritionists came in next because boxers is a weight category sport and they have a challenge with eating properly and all that type of stuff and good diets.

Then we centralized the program in Dublin, which was a major decision, you know, because nobody wanted that.

Nobody wanted that.

And nobody believed that would actually work or boxers would come to Dublin.

But they came because I believe that had to be centralized because if we had a decentralized that we would have had less control and the quality of work that was going on, it would have been harder to manage.

So having everything central and having our best resources in around the athletes in terms of coaching and sports science and medicine was a major deal for us.

And then we transformed what was one ring and seven bags to three rings, an S&C area, a physio area, recovery area.

We built a dormitory in the attic and the guys lived there, slept there, ate there, socialized there, got together, got to know each other.