Rosie Eccles: “I love representing Wales and competing in the Commonwealth Games. Why not go out like that? It just feels right.”

Rosie Eccles: “I love representing Wales and competing in the Commonwealth Games. Why not go out like that? It just feels right.”

Some decisions are hard. Some are beyond even that. Letting go of a lifetime dream is never easy. Even when it is the only decision to make.

In recent times, Rosie Eccles has had to let go of her dream of Olympic glory. At 29, her body can’t give anymore. Certainly not enough for her to carry on boxing until 2028 and one last Olympic cycle. The mind is willing. The body isn’t.

Eccles has yet retired. That is coming. One last Commonwealth Games. A silver medal in 2018 became gold four years later. In Glasgow, in just a few months, Eccles wants to go out on a high. On her terms. Either way, then it really will be over.

After Glasgow, that will be it. The Olympic dream finally extinguished. We spent around twenty minutes on Zoom. In truth, it felt like a therapy session. A fighter still trying to process that she won’t grace another Olympic Games. Eccles has been delaying the inevitable, hoping that there would be a place for her in Los Angeles.

“It was a really tough decision to make,” Eccles admitted to me over Zoom. “Even at Christmas, if you had told me that this would happen, I would have argued until I was blue in the face. I went back to GB, more or less full-time. I did some split training. My new contract said I could split my training between Sheffield and Wales. So I could lengthen my career a bit, more recovery. But I did a bit of a longer stint at GB leading up to Christmas. I did four weeks, but I knew even in the second week I could feel it. I said it was only four weeks, and I could recover over Christmas. I did more damage than I expected.

“I started the new year trying to recover a little bit and take things down a notch. I didn’t start the year in a great place. I was physically exhausted. I think it just hit me. I was speaking with my performance director in Wales, and I was in floods of tears. I said my body can’t do this anymore. He said is it time to retire. At that point, I was too emotional. I hadn’t even said that out loud. I said let me push back, and something might magically change. I wanted to see if things would change after a bit of a taper. They didn’t; they got worse. I came home, and my body was in a mess. An absolute mess.”

Eccles still couldn’t admit to herself that it was over. Fighting with herself. Conflicted emotions. Even during our time on Zoom, and a week or so after she broke her news, the tears were always close. Seemingly ready to flow.

“I spoke with Colin Jones, who has been training since I was 18,” Eccles added. “He said that’s how you feel when the end of your career is coming. He said it’s probably a bit of an ask for you to follow that schedule. He said you do want to retire completely, and I said no. I had a chat with Rob, and my lead coach in Sheffield, and they were really respectful. Everyone understood and wished me well. I was very lucky, really.”

The Olympics have always been her dream. Covid cost her a place in Tokyo. Eccles qualified for Paris. But a highly controversial split-decision loss to Poland’s Aneta Rygielska in the opening round left a bitter taste. I thought Eccles won beyond any reasonable doubt. Another Olympic dream ruined by the uncontrollable. Another Michael Conlan moment. Maybe it was that that drove Eccles on. Trying to turn an injustice into some kind of justice. Despite everything she has achieved in the amateur code, when her body didn’t fail her. Boxing did.

“The Olympics have been everything for me,” Eccles says. “There were a lot of complications, even within the Paris cycle. I would have cut a limb off, and I would have kept going. That’s how much the Olympics mean to me. I have had limbs that weren’t working. I have had trouble with my heart in the past. I have had other problems, but I have always been able to push through. I can remember in Paris coming out of the ring after losing the decision, a fight I believed that I had won, and I was in floods of tears because I knew my body couldn’t do another cycle.”

“I will detail more when I have retired,” Eccles added about her ongoing injury woes. You sense they run a little deeper than we know. “Things that will affect me later in life. Things I would like later in life.”

An elite athlete has to push her body through unimaginable pain. They give everything. Too much. Eccles realised she couldn’t give any more in pursuit of that Olympic glory.

“I made a promise to myself when I was 16 to become an Olympic champion,” Eccles relayed to me. “And I always held on to that. But I have realised that boxing has given me so much, it has changed my life, and I was risking taking away what it has given me.

“It was no health first. But before, nobody could have convinced me it was health first. I wanted to win Olympic gold. It didn’t matter. I would have kept pushing and pushing. But for this cycle, it was health first, and I set that in a big meeting at the start. But it was very difficult to live up to my own promise. Other boxers have said I am still young. But it’s how hard you pushed and how long you have been in the system. I appreciate now more than ever what my body has done. I wish I had as much knowledge then as I do now. The way I pushed all those years. The more I pushed. The more I broke. I always probably went another step too far. I might not have got as much success if I hadn’t done that. But I took something away from my longevity. We all wish we could be athletes forever. But I have no regrets. If I hadn’t gone after it with everything. I would never have known. I gave everything, and probably more than I truly had. It just wasn’t meant to be.”

Rosie Eccles is still fighting. The full-on retirement is coming. But she fully intends to go out in style. Fighting and winning medals for her country. “I love representing Wales and competing in the Commonwealth Games. Why not go out like that? It just feels right.”