Fighting for A-class
Fearless 16-year-old Ballyphehane Muay Thai fighter Aideen Mullins is taking on an opponent in her thirties in her first senior kickboxing showdown, and has her sights set on turning pro.
Open the door of The Rock Steps Community Centre on Blarney Street in Cork city of a chilly, dark evening, and the first thing that hits you is the distant sounds of shouting, echoing from somewhere within the building.
Step further in and find your way to the main hall, and the Siam Warriors Muay Thai training session is in full flow: some fighters shout with every kick or punch they land on the pads braced in their training partner’s hands.
In their midst is Aideen Mullins: 16, clad in a Hollister t-shirt, circling her coach Martin Horgan, about to unleash a flurry of rapid-fire punches and kicks.
Four weeknights out of five, and Saturday mornings, this is where you’ll find Aideen. The teen, who’s in Transition Year in Christ King secondary school in Turner’s Cross, has been practicing Muay Thai, or Thai Boxing, for more years of her life than she hasn’t.
She started the notoriously tough martial art nine years ago at the age of seven, when she went to try it out alongside a cousin, and the bug bit, instantly and hard. Not for Aideen’s cousin, though: just for her.
“She didn’t like it, but I kept going anyway,” Aideen says with a grin, coming off the mats to talk for a minute.
A Senior Title
Now Aideen faces a new challenge: Saturday, in Clonmel, she will face Clane kickboxer Jillian Fitzgerald for the ISKA (International Sport Kickboxing Association) K1 Irish Title in her welterweight class.
“She’s in her thirties,” Aideen tells me of her opponent.
Until now, Aideen has fought at a junior level and with some success: she took bronze in the WBC Muay Thai Youth World Games in Calgary in Canada last August, where under 18s from 78 countries competed.
So her upcoming fight in Clonmel is not only for a national title, but the first time she’ll enter the fray as a senior fighter. And there’s one more thing: trained in Muay Thai, where elbows and knees are not only allowed, but an integral part of the action, in Saturday’s fight, she’ll be restricted to kickboxing rules, where only punching and kicking are allowed.
“I can kick, but I can’t really knee, so I’m training now to do that,” she says. “Martin has me working extra hard.”
Is she nervous? “I’d be a bit nervous before a fight, but not during it,” she says. “Then I love it.”
Is there anything she is afraid of? Her brow wrinkles for a second before she can think of something: “Getting injured, because I love training and I love fighting. Even if I don’t win, I love the buzz of fighting and if I got injured I won’t be able to do that, I might have to take a break.”
First Clonmel, then…..the world
After Clonmel, where Aideen hopes to be earning her first senior title, she has plans. Big plans.
“After that I want to go professional, a European title first and then the world championships,” she says. “It’s baby steps all the time towards it.”
“I would like to be A-Class, professional. I’m B-Class now and I’m hoping to move up after I’m seventeen.”
The 2025 world championships will be held in Thailand: Aideen is planning on competing there, but also hopes to stay on and train for a month or two in the spiritual and cultural home of the sport.
As she’s 16, Aideen is straddling the worlds of both junior and senior competition for a brief time: she’s still able to compete for junior titles as well as entering seniors, and so she’s working towards the junior world championships in Venice next June, too.
See it to be it, Cork-style
I ask her who her sporting hero is and, although she has enormous admiration for Katie Taylor, she doesn’t have far to look for her real inspiration: she turns and points across the room to where Ryan Sheehan, a multiple world champion who hails from Knocknheeny, is being put through his fearsome paces.
“Ryan has signed to ONE Championship which is huge, bigger than UFC,” she says. “He’s after going professional and is going to the world championship. Just seeing that, because he’s done it all from here, makes me think I can do it too.”
Aideen’s coach, Martin Horgan, has himself been European Champion twice and has coached several other champions. What does it take to succeed in such a tough martial art?
“Some fighters are grinders and they can get hit really hard and come back strong, others are really technical and they read an opponent well: that’s the beauty of Thai Boxing,” Martin tells me. “You can have a really heavy puncher and a really skilful kicker up against each other, you can have someone who’s what we call ‘good on the outside,’ with their kicking and punching, up against someone who’s ‘good on the inside,’ with their knees.”
“But a good fighter has a good all-round approach. It’s important to be clever because then you’re not getting hit. But there’s an element of being a bit tough and being able to withstand when fights get hard.”
So how does he fancy Aideen’s chances in Clonmel? He smiles. “She’s sixteen and fighting for a senior women’s title, so she’s jumping ahead of herself,” he says. “But she’s well able to compete.”
Muay Thai is undeniably male-dominated - there are three other women training tonight, almost 20 men - but Martin doesn’t think there’s much difference there when it comes to how to prepare someone for a fight.
“Everyone has a hard fight ahead of them when they’re preparing for a fight,” he says. “When they’re young, you’re trying to develop them, trying to teach them to relax and focus if they’re getting anxious. You just work with people, give them advice. And it’s not always going to work out. There can be tears when they lose, but they did their best and if they didn’t come forward that time, you’re just trying to help them build back up again.”
The Muay Thai capital of Ireland
Siam Warriors have been going since 2003, and Martin Horgan and Ryan Sheehan are not the only champions out of the club: Super Lightweight World Champion Sean Clancy also trains here and this is not the only club in Cork.
Exactly how and why Thai Boxing came to be so popular in Cork is a little unclear, but it’s fair to say that Cork is the Muay Thai capital of Ireland, dating back to the early naughties when Cobh Thai boxer Craig O’Flynn defeated Thailand’s own national champion Kongdej Sittradtrakan in a fight in Neptune Stadium.
“It’s even known round the world that a lot of champions have come to Cork, even from Thailand, over the years,” Martin says. “We’ve had a lot of important fights in Neptune Stadium: we’ve had two of the best fighters from Thailand come and fight each other in Cork.”
For Aideen, being a girl in Muay Thai does mean that she sometimes feels driven to prove herself, especially when it comes to the longevity of her fighting career. But she relishes the respectful atmosphere at Siam Warriors: everyone’s just here to train, she says. Male, female, a variety of ages.
“I think it’s just the atmosphere; everyone is lovely,” she says. “If you’re sparring and even if you’re hurting each other, you’ll have a hug at the end of it.”
While she’s incredibly ambitious - she pulls a face when I mention the bronze in Calgary, says she’d hoped for more - she’s also level-headed, and is planning on going to college after her Leaving Cert, to have a solid plan B in place.
Whatever happens, Aideen’s family will be on hand for her first senior battle. She has two sisters and a brother. “They love it,” she says. “They don’t do it themselves, but they come to the fights. And my dad loves it. They’ll be more nervous than me, but they always come.”
Teenage life is full of pressures and uncertainty: school, peers, plans for the future. But for Aideen, her gruelling training regimen and the pressure of fights is all a part of doing what she loves, and she has a remarkably mature way of reminding herself of that.
“Sometimes I miss out on stuff, but I just remember that I don’t need to be here,” she says. “I’m here because I love it: no-one has ever put me under pressure to do it, and I feel like that’s why I love it so much. I’m just here because I want to be.”
Aideen Mullins Vs Jillian Fitzgerald is on the bill at Courage Muay Thai Premier Fight Night at the Talbot Hotel in Clonmel on Saturday March 4: they are one of 16 fights starting from 6pm. More info here.
Thanks for transporting us to where we don't normally go.