Jim McCourt won a bronze medal in the men’s lightweight boxing at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games – the sixth boxing medal in Ireland’s Olympic history and the only Irish medal won during the three Olympic Games of the 1960s.

Born on 24 January 1944 in Leeson Street, off the Lower Falls Road in Belfast, McCourt joined the Immaculata Boxing Club as an eleven-year-old, a club that had already produced an Olympic medallist in John Caldwell.

In 1963 he won both the Ulster and national junior and senior featherweight titles; in 1964 he moved through the lightweight divisions to secure Olympic selection. He was training at the St Dominic Savio Club in Andersonstown under coach Jack McCusker at the time of the Games. He beat Korean champion Bun-Nam Suh in his first bout, then counter-punched Pakistan’s Ghulam Sarwar into defeat in his second.

Against Spain’s Domingo Barrera in the bronze medal contest, McCourt’s scientific boxing mastered a wild two-handed swinger, earning a clear judges’ verdict and the bronze medal.

In the semi-final against Soviet knockout specialist Victor Barannikov, McCourt dominated the second and third rounds with clean, crisp hitting. The three neutral judges chose Barannikov, a verdict described by Nat Fleischer of Ring Magazine as ‘possibly the worst of many extraordinary decisions in the boxing events at the Tokyo Olympic Games.’

McCourt later added a European lightweight bronze (Berlin 1965) and a light-welterweight Commonwealth gold (Kingston, Jamaica, 1966) to his collection.