Ireland’s greatest athlete retired on Saturday night with a shutout win over Flora Pili, becoming a three-time undisputed world champion in the first boxing event at Croke Park since Muhammad Ali fought there in 1972.
There was no ambiguity about it, and after everything that came before, that felt like the point. Katie Taylor closed a career that changed women’s sport with a wide unanimous decision over France’s Flora Pili at Croke Park on Saturday night, and then put her gloves down in the centre of the ring.
The judges scored it 100-90, 100-90 and 98-91. Taylor retires with a professional record of 26-1, an Olympic gold medal, world titles across two divisions, and the distinction of being an undisputed champion three separate times.
The fight
Pili arrived unbeaten at 12-0 as the WBC mandatory challenger, eleven years younger than the champion, and left with almost nothing to show for it. Taylor controlled the range from the opening bell, using her footwork and volume to bank rounds, and Pili’s output never rose to a level that threatened to change the arithmetic.
Two of the three judges gave the Frenchwoman not a single round. By the middle rounds it was clear that only a stoppage would alter the result, and it never looked likely. The vacant WBC super-lightweight title was on the line alongside Taylor’s WBO, WBA, IBF and Ring Magazine belts, which meant the win delivered undisputed status at 140 pounds for a second time.
“Croke Park, we did it,” Taylor told the crowd afterwards, before adding that she doubted any other country would sell 80,000 tickets for a female athlete.
The occasion
The event, promoted by Matchroom and Aiken Promotions under the title Once Upon A Time, was the first boxing card staged at Croke Park since Muhammad Ali fought Al “Blue” Lewis there in July 1972. Tickets sold out in a reported seventeen minutes, and 83,000 people were inside the stadium by the time the main event began. It was broadcast worldwide on DAZN and free-to-air in Ireland on RTÉ2.
Taylor had spoken publicly about wanting to finish at Croke Park for years. An earlier attempt to stage a homecoming there fell through over costs, which is how she ended up at the 3Arena in May 2023 against Chantelle Cameron, and how she suffered the only defeat of her professional career.
The career
The scale of what she leaves behind is difficult to overstate. Taylor won Olympic gold in London in 2012 at a Games where women’s boxing was contested for the first time, a result that made her a national figure. Turning professional in 2016, she became undisputed lightweight champion, moved up to light-welterweight, lost to Cameron, then beat her in the rematch to reclaim undisputed status.
Her trilogy with Amanda Serrano did as much as any series of fights to establish women’s boxing commercially. Their 2022 meeting at Madison Square Garden was the first time two women headlined the venue. Taylor won all three, the middle one controversially, the third by majority decision at a Garden card that carried a record seventeen titles across five world title fights.
She finishes widely regarded as the greatest female boxer in history, and as the athlete who made the argument for women’s professional boxing commercially unanswerable. On Saturday, in the stadium she wanted, she was not required to prove anything further.
