Local boxing coach was part of Ireland's Tokyo Olympics team
Having worked closely with Olympic Gold medallist, Kellie Harrington, over the past five years at the Irish boxing High Performance Unit in Dublin, Tullamore’s Dima Dmitruk is not surprised at her success at the Tokyo Olympics.
“She is a supreme athlete and she was totally focussed on her performance, and that is the way she has always been” says the acclaimed boxing coach who has been working with Kellie and Ireland’s Elite boxing squad at the Sport Ireland Campus in Abbotstown since 2016.
In fact, Dima Dmitruk has the distinction of having worked Kellie Harrington’s corner, along with Head Coach, Zaur Antia, when she stamped her authority on the international boxing scene by winning a Gold medal at the World Boxing Championships in New Delhi, India in 2018.
Dima is the founder of the Spartacus Boxing Club in Tullamore, and was one of three coaches to accompany the Irish Boxing team to the Tokyo Olympics along with Zuar Antia and John Conlon. He described the performance of the team as “absolutely unreal” and said the whole Olympic experience was “very positive” from start to finish.
The seven-member team, along with their coaches and support staff spent six weeks in Japan, as they had a training camp before the Olympic Games got underway, but Dima says there was “a very good atmosphere” and everybody was very focussed on the job ahead.
“I don’t think anybody expected us to qualify more than two or three boxers, and there was no big expectation of bringing home medals, so to secure two medals, one of them Gold, was just unbelievable for such a small nation” points out Dima.
Ireland finished seventh overall in the Boxing Medals Table at the Olympics, ahead of many countries with much bigger populations and a very strong record in boxing, including Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the USA. “That record speaks for itself” he says.
Tokyo was the second Olympic experience for Dima Dmitruk, having travelled as head coach with the High Performance team to the Youth Olympics in Argentina in 2018, where Leitrim featherweight, Dearbhla Rooney, took home a Bronze medal.
Throughout the six weeks in Tokyo, Dima said there was a “very close bond” between the boxing team, and the full focus for everybody was on performance. “Every member of the team was totally focused, so we didn’t find Covid to be a big issue as we did our best not to let anything distract us from the job at hand.”
With a well-earned rest ahead for a couple of weeks with his wife and family in Tullamore, Dima says the Olympic success of Kellie Harrington and Aidan Walsh will place a renewed focus on boxing in much the same way that Katie Taylor did in 2012. He is hoping that this will result in new members joining the Spartacus Boxing Club, which is now based in Cloncollig.
The Spartacus Club has a regular timetable of classes for adults and juniors throughout the week under the stewardship of Head Coach, Victor Kuzmenko and his coaching staff of Vadim, Paul Loonam and Michael McDonagh.
While Kellie Harrington basks in her well-earned Olympic success, Dima Dmitruk says it takes huge “dedication, discipline, hard work and self-belief” to get to the top in the extremely competitive world of boxing. “Kellie is living proof that anything is possible, and it has been a great privilege to work with her.”