“Yeah, mainly portraits or sometimes a bit of still life, you know,” says boxer Dean Clancy. Talking art, one of the other talents of the Irish lightweight before he begins his Olympic Games on Saturday against Jordanian Obada Alkasbeh, is not a difficult diversion.
Clancy, the first of the Irish boxers to step into a competitive Olympic ring in the north of the city at the Paris Arena, has his sketch pad with him in the Olympic Village.
He also had his book and pencils at the recent European Championships and during the downtime in competition, he began work on portraits of the people in front of him.
“The boys didn’t actually know and I’ve been with them for three years,” he says. “I was just sketching away. I’d just done a portrait of Jack Marley. Yeah, I gave it to him. Yeah, he was impressed with it.”
The top 25 women’s sporting moments of the year: 25-16 revealed with Vikki Wall, Lara Gillespie and Ireland Sevens featuring
Mona McSharry enjoying the scenic route after realising her Olympic dream
From missing out on the Olympics to winning an AFLW title, nobody had a year like Vikki Wall
Charlotte Dujardin banned for one year over horse-whipping incident
Like boxing, Clancy’s art has come directly through his family. His father, Jason, was and is a rock for his son in the ring: shaped him, pushed him and taught him about the nuanced things in the sport, focus and discipline.
His grandfather, Clancy, is the direct line to his interest in capturing on paper the different images of the people around him at training or in the Village. There is plenty of time for pause in a full-time boxing life and his meeting with Alkasbeh on Saturday afternoon in the Olympic Games is the pinnacle. So far.
“I only got back into it recently there,” he says of drawing his team-mates. “My grandad was a very good painter. It came from him, my grandfather Benny Clancy in Manorhamilton. I’ve never actually seen all his work, but I remember seeing an exhibition in Leitrim Sculpture [Centre]. We had a big room full of his paintings.
“Jesus it was amazing to look at. He painted everything. A lot of nature and Leitrim. If you went to our house, you’d notice the stuff around the walls.”
“To me, it’s a good way to unwind and not be stuck on social media. I have a sketch pad with me at the Olympics ... maybe copy a few things in the Louvre! Or try to anyway!”
Clancy won’t get close to the Louvre, at least until the boxing ends. The Olympic venue’s location north of Paris is just for the early stages of the competition before it moves closer to the city into a more regal setting at the tennis mecca in Roland Garros from the quarter-final stage onwards.
But Clancy’s Olympic Games, in reality, do not just begin on Saturday. They began even before London 2012, when he remembers sitting in his livingroom in Sligo with his family, mesmerised by the occasion of Katie Taylor winning the first ever lightweight Olympic gold medal.
By then Clancy had converted from kick-boxing to boxing. His dad, having seen something in his son, already had him thinking about being the best he could be.
As a schoolboy he had already adopted a professional attitude to his sport and spent his school breaks eating specially prepared food, the right kind of lunch for an aspiring champion.
Throughout his teenage years the steely focus didn’t yield to distraction. He trained in the morning before school, went to his studies and did a second session in the evening. The Leaving Cert and the boxing had a respectful relationship, neither giving way to the other.
With family support, boxing was always geared towards one thing: the Olympic Games. Clancy’s superpower was he didn’t just dream about it, he lived his life to make it happen.
“There’s a part of me that really believes I’m meant to be here,” he says. “It’s just rolled and fallen into place. Since getting into boxing everything has been leading towards this.
“Gearing up to Junior Europeans and Junior Worlds, even going into the Leaving Cert year, I’d get up at six, go the gym, do my pad work and then go home shower, go to school and then train in the evening. Mum wasn’t too happy ... I could manage both ... she’s big into the boxing as well, not coaching but making sure everything is right.”
It has become one of the truisms of Olympic sport that family are the connective tissue in an athlete’s locker, as important as tactics, ability or training. Without it everything collapses and the centre cannot hold.
When Clancy was qualifying last year at the European Games in Krackow, his grandfather on his mother’s side, Tony Walsh, was ill. But he was in good spirits when his grandson saw him before travelling to Poland.
Still, life took over and Clancy found himself swirling around a ring on his way to beating Italy’s Gianluigi Malanga for his place in the Paris Arena today just as Tony was being laid to rest in Sligo’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.
“He was sick for a while but the last thing I expected was for it to happen before one of the biggest fights of my life at the time,” he says. “I remember he was a massive fan of boxing. He would have watched Muhammad Ali back in the day on TV and the radio. He wanted me to qualify as much as myself. It was difficult. I remember my mum and the family had a great support network at home. I just had to stay focused and do the job and do it for him.
“Yeah ... it was the saddest day I remember. I was on the phone to mum chatting to her. She was in the hospital. I was on a little bit of a buzz after my [first] fight. Then I found out that evening. I had a few days to gather my thoughts and get into the qualifying.
“I’d be quite religious and do believe in prayer and after my fight I pointed up to him ... that he would be looking down. The funeral was on the same day. It was actually on when I was in the ring which is kind of crazy. My brother had the live results when they were entering the church. Crazy day.”
There is a selection of tattoos running along Clancy’s left arm. His entire shoulder is half a tiger’s head with just one menacing eye and underneath is a butterfly. There is also a dove and an angel.
“That’s the hands of creation yeah,” he says pointing at another piece of ink on the inside of his forearm. “That’s the Holy Spirit there,” he adds moving his finger across the skin. “That’s an angel ... but yeah that’s the Hands of Creation above the dove.”
A reference to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling might appear to be overblown but nothing in boxing ever is. It’s not difficult to believe it takes an overblown mindset to just step through the ropes.
From the technical grounding in high performance to the sauna and cold sea swims in Rosses Point in Sligo, Clancy is conditioned to be fearless and high achieving. Like the other nine athletes on the Irish team, he is already part of a phenomenal Irish achievement.
With 10 men and women athletes qualified, only Australia with 12 boxers and Uzbekistan with 11 have a bigger team in Paris. Ireland is the joint third largest in the world along with Kazakhstan and Brazil.
The USA, led by former Irish team coach Billy Walsh, has a team of eight boxing athletes, while Britain has six.
“The drive is boxing,” says Clancy. “It is a passion of mine. I enjoy it. My very first goal was to win a Sligo/Leitrim title in school. Then a Connacht title, then an Irish title, European medal, to get to the Olympics, look towards Paris 2024 and bring back a medal.”
Boxing pads and sketch pads are just a few of the many things that have got Clancy here. On Saturday afternoon he will know if they were enough for the lifelong journey to continue.
