VIEWING FIGURES:MORE THAN a million people in their own homes tuned in to watch Katie Taylor's gold medal fight on RTÉ television on Thursday afternoon.
An average of 1.1 million viewers watched the 18 minutes from when Taylor stepped into the ring at 4.45pm to her moment of victory against Russian Sofya Ochigava at 5.02pm.
The figures released by RTÉ yesterday do not include people watching the fight on televisions at work, in pubs and in public places or listening to it on the radio or watching online.
An average of some three-quarters of a million people watched the 2½-hour fight coverage before the women’s lightweight Olympic final, RTÉ said. This coverage included build-up, analysis and medal presentation. The boxing panel included 2008 silver Olympic medallist Kenny Egan and professional boxer Bernard Dunne. Many more people watched or listened to the bout in public places and online.
Between 8,000 and 10,000 fans gathered to see the fight on a big screen in front of the leisure centre at Taylor’s home area of Ballywaltrim, Bray, Co Wicklow.
People in Bray saw the fight despite a power cut in the area between 4.05pm and 4.35pm.
Such was the demand for the online stream of Thursday’s fight that RTÉ set up a dedicated Olympic streaming web page.
This followed a failure of the stream for Taylor’s semi-final against Tajikistan’s Mavzuna Chorieva on Wednesday when a surge of users tried to access the fight. RTÉ apologised for the outage, which it said was unrelated to the website’s streaming capacity.
