FINN Valley ABC’s hammer-handed heavyweight Michael Gallagher is planning for a career as a professional boxer.
This weekend, the 19-year-old from Kinletter travels with club coach Conor Quigley to Wales to train with Nathan Cleverly, the former WBO light-heavyweight world champion.
For the last few weeks, Gallagher has been working in Dublin alongside Frank Buglioni, the WBO European super middleweight champion and recently-crowned WBA Inter-Continental super middleweight champion.
The powerful Finn Valley ace is a ten-time Irish champion, who won the last of his national titles in January 2014 when he overcame Cavan’s Gary Maughan in the Irish Open Youth Championship final, when he stopped his opponent in the second round.
Gallagher was a bronze medalist at the 2010 European Schoolboy Championships and last year won a Youth Olympic bronze medal in Nanjing, China.
Gallagher defeated Kim Jin-Nyong from Korea to win bronze (pictured above).
He rose from the disappointment of a semi-final defeat by Cuba’s World champion Yordan Hernandez to take a 29-28, 29-28, 30-27 win over the tough Korean, a bronze medalist in the World Championships.
Also in 2014, Gallagher reached the quarter-finals of the World Youth Championships in Sofia, where he was beaten by eventual gold medalist Hernandez.
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