SPORTSWOMAN OF THE YEAR/KATIE TAYLOR:KATIE TAYLOR'S speciality to date has been to perform her particular brand of the "sweet science" when few Irish people have been looking. A World Championship in India and another in China interspersed with three European titles took a little time, but it has finally started turning heads. And how they have really turned.

While many have seen her being interviewed on sports bulletins and talk shows more often than performing in the ring, Taylor has now become the sportswoman the public are longing to see.

It has largely been over the last six months that the boxing champion and soccer international has loomed into public view. She has been in greater demand lately and it has taken the retention of her lightweight World Amateur Championship title to do it.

During that competition last November in China, the governing body of the sport, the International Amateur Boxing Association (IABA), also decided that the Irish girl was the best amateur female boxer in the world over all divisions and before Christmas she was invited to Moscow to receive an international award for that recognition.

It would not be inaccurate to say that over the next few years at European Championship level and at the World Championships leading up to a London Olympic Games, where she hopes that women’s boxing will become part of the schedule, a lot will be expected from the quietly-spoken, personable girl from Bray.

That expectation shouldn’t weigh too heavily as Taylor, under the sure guidance of her father Peter, has consistently set benchmarks and reached them. This year she was able to step up once again and set a global benchmark. Now the rest of the world look on to see how they can reach the ever rising levels of the 22-year-old Irish woman with the no-fuss charm.

Coached at the St Fergal’s Boxing Club in Bray by her father, who was the 1986 Irish senior lightweight champion, Taylor’s rise to the top of her sport has surged in the last four years. Up to as recently as 2004 she wasn’t receiving any funding from the Irish Sports Council (ISC), an indicator of what level governing bodies believe their athletes have reached.

The young athlete initially came to notice in 2001 when she boxed in the first officially sanctioned women’s bout in Ireland against 16-year-old Alanna Audley from Belfast. She was 15 years old at the time. Shortly after that her football career also took off, graduating through the under-17 and under-19 international levels before joining the senior team.

She returned to boxing the following year in March to meet Candy Berry of England at 57kg as part of a show that featured an Ireland v Canada senior men’s tournament.

It wasn’t long before the rest of the boxing world began to take notice and, as an 18-year-old in 2005 she became the first Irish woman to take a gold medal in a European Championships in Tonsberg, Norway. She won by defeating Eva Wahlstrom of Finland in the third round of their lightweight final.

However, the Irish public had not yet begun to appreciate the teenager despite the boxing community agreeing that Taylor was a rare talent.

That view was reinforced later in the year at the World Amateur Championships in Poldolsk, Russia, where Taylor advanced to the quarter-finals before being ousted by Kum Hui Hang of Korea. Then at the 2006 European Amateur Championships in Warsaw, Poland, Taylor won her second gold medal. Importantly, she made it to the final of that event by stopping the reigning world champion, Tatiana Chalaya of Russia, while collecting the tournament’s Best Boxer award on the way.

In doing so, she posted her intentions for the World Championships that were to be staged later that year in India.

It was Chalaya who Taylor again defeated in the World Championships semi-final, before beating Annabella Farias of Argentina to become the first Irish female boxing world champion.

The third European Championship fell her way in Denmark in 2007 before she went on to earn the crown as the best female amateur fighter in the world with her second World Championship at Ningbo, China, in November of last year in the 60kg class, defeating China’s Cheng Dong in the final bout.

Now Taylor is considered an athlete who straddles her sport, a global heavyweight in the lightweight division and a character who carries the accolade and the position lightly.

There is another World Championship event scheduled for September 2010 and a European Championships before that. She is still young enough to reap greater benefit from her talent and with the decision due to be made next autumn on whether the sport that she dominates is to be allowed into the Olympic Games, perhaps she will finally have a platform that will allow her make a bid to become the outstanding Irish sportswoman of her generation – if she is not already that person.