The Manhattan-born student-athlete needs to get his weight down a few manageable kilos to be ready for the US National Championships which take place in Lafayette, Louisiana in less than two weeks.

These are the Olympic trials for Team USA and O’Bradaigh will be one of the top 15 light heavyweights in the nation challenging to qualify for the Paris Games, now less than 250 days away.

It won’t be a shocker to learn that he holds his Irish roots very close to his heart. He even took his best shot at representing Team Ireland next summer. Named after his grandfather, the Irish republican activist. Seán Ó Brádaigh, he has opted to simplify the situation only so much for America, dropping the fadas and leaning into everything else. Through his Belgian mother, he is proudly trilingual.

Earlier this month, O’Bradaigh fell at the semi-final hurdle to European champion Gabriel Dossen during the Irish Elites held at the National Stadium. Rather than let the defeat drag him down, he is mining motivation for Louisiana out of the trip and out of the stiff competition he got to experience at close quarters in Dublin.

Above all else, he was energised by the chance to share a ring with Dossen, a fighter he admired as a fan before ever daring to dream he could take him on.

“[Dossen has] had like 200 amateur fights and I used to watch him fight for Ireland and support him,” O’Bradaigh told me Wednesday when we spoke by phone. “I used to follow him and then I ended up fighting him which is crazy.

“But yeah, there's a lot of quality guys in Ireland. It’s very difficult to make their national team.” 

He even enlisted the expertise of Michael Carruth for his corner, an opportunity which delighted his father Cillian as much as it did the fighter himself, born a full decade after the Drimnagh boxer stopped an entire nation in its tracks when winning in Barcelona.

“It’s crazy to think that my dad was watching Michael Carruth win gold 30 years ago with his friends in his New York apartment," he remarked, acknowledging the unlikely scenario in which his world and his father's youthful self collided.

"It was a great experience," O’Bradaigh added. "They fight without headgear in the elite amateurs and in Ireland. In the US you fight with headgear until you make the national team and compete internationally. So I had my first fight without headgear which is kind of awesome.” 

He happily offers that he is in a minority of one among his peers when it comes to choosing boxing. He got to experience a wide variety of sports as a young student at the somewhat exclusive environs of the Lycée Français de New York. But the lure of the fight game dragged him in after a family friend visiting from Dublin convinced his father and his twin sons to join him at a UFC night involving an up-and-coming talent called Conor McGregor.

He was just 13 at the time and of course hugely impressionable. He kicked up enough of a fuss to be signed up to learn the sport at an MMA gym.

He enjoyed the opportunity to learn the ropes for a few months before a boxing coach began to notice a different path for him. “Screw this MMA stuff, you have good hands. Let's go to a boxing gym.” 

He took to it immediately. “I had my first sparring session and I beat up this other kid. It all started from there.

“For me, it's just the purest form of competition. You're not competing against someone else with a racket and a ball, you're not bouncing a basketball and trying to put it through a hoop.

“It's nine minutes, three three-minute rounds. You have to do everything you can to beat the other guy just with your gloves, with your fists that are gloved up. So I just liked the idea of that.” 

By the time he got to the age of 16, he was convinced that he was all in. Always the more competitive of the twins, to the point of tears and temper tantrums, he was ready to target the top level of the Sweet Science.

That summer of 2018, he was doing community service work in Senegal. While there, he whiled away some of his spare hours reading a book about chasing dreams. The author told him to write down his life goals and the first thing that sprang to mind was: “I want to win a gold medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics.” 

It wasn’t until after competition reopened post-lockdown that he got the opportunity to train and compete consistently. Starting a real estate degree at NYU tied in conveniently; it was the perfect time to help him build out a flexible training schedule.

“I just started competing and I haven't stopped since. I've had 26 fights in the space of two years. I won the New York championships and I also won the New York Golden Gloves which was a total of five fights. I fought at the Garden which was amazing.” 

O’Bradaigh enjoys a very energetic following among family, friends, peers and general fight fans. He delights in the promotional side, running a very well-managed Instagram account where he revels in his achievements and a level of charisma to match. Looking around at his rivals, he realised he could do this better.

When I suggested to him that isn’t the first of his name to know the value of being media savvy, he laughs about how he needs to help Google differentiate between the Wikipedia page of a Sinn Féiner and the images of a young victorious boxer.

He credits his grandfather and his even more prominent granduncle, Ruairi Ó Brádaigh, with the “fighting spirit” he displays in the ring today. The same Ruairi Ó Brádaigh who headed up the IRA in the 1970s and who was also the direct predecessor of Gerry Adams as president of Sinn Féin.

“Growing up, my dad did tell us about that side of our family. Obviously, when he was growing up, it was the most important thing in my family. He spoke Irish with his parents at home and there was always a big emphasis on Irish culture and Irish freedom.

“With me and my brother. It's a little different because we're in New York City. We're not in the midst of it all. Generation over generation it'll slowly decrease but it'll always be a significant part of our family.” 

His parents don't want him to turn professional and he won’t consider it until he can win a national championship, whether it’s this time around or the next. Nothing fulfils him as much as boxing, not his studies at NYU or the prospect of climbing the corporate ladder in a city where real estate will always be a contender no matter what.

By his own reckoning, he’ll be up against it in Lafayette to where he earned a wild card qualification partly due to reaching a couple of national semi-finals. The convoluted road map between Louisiana and Paris will potentially involve another chance to impress the head of US Boxing, Billy Walsh, at Colorado Springs.

“There's no easy fight, there's a couple that I've beaten and a couple that I've lost to so I'm kind of in the middle there. The issue is most of them have more experience than me.” 

Tall for a middleweight, he often enjoys a superior reach to his opponents. But he won’t have his usual army of supporters down south, with just his coach, Angel Rivera, in tow alongside his father.

“My coach has been training me for five years. I'm very close to him. This time my dad's going to come as well which will be cool. It's the biggest tournament of my life. So, you know, it's great to get that extra support. Just me, my dad and my coach.”