The last ring walk of Katie Taylor’s career came in front of a sold-out Croke Park in Dublin on Saturday night, with fireworks launching from three sides of the stadium roof and more than 82,000 people on their feet. The song she chose to walk to was not a stadium anthem or a hard-charging entrance track. It was “All Hail King Jesus,” a quiet worship song recorded by Bethel Music, and it played while the biggest crowd ever assembled in Ireland for a female athlete watched her take the longest walk of her life.
If you are watching from the United States, there is a good chance you first met Taylor on Netflix. She fought Amanda Serrano on the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson card in November 2024, and again in their trilogy bout at Madison Square Garden in July 2025, which became the most-watched American boxing event of that year. Before that she won Olympic gold in London in 2012 and spent a decade turning women’s boxing from an undercard curiosity into a main event. Saturday’s fight, carried in the States on DAZN pay-per-view, was the end of all of it.
The song is worth knowing something about. “All Hail King Jesus” appears on Bethel Music’s Homecoming album, released in 2021, and is led by Bethany Wohrle. There is a neatness to that detail that no promoter could have scripted. Taylor spent her professional career fighting in New York, London, Manchester and Texas, and she came back to Dublin to finish, walking to a song from a record called Homecoming. As RTÉ’s Mikey Stafford put it from inside the stadium, it was a devotional song that in most settings would stop a party cold, and instead it lifted the place another level.
This was not a one-time gesture, which is part of why it registers. Taylor has been walking out to worship music for years. She entered to Hillsong Worship’s “Awake My Soul” for both of her fights against Serrano, including the rematch at AT&T Stadium that TDN covered in November 2024. She used Elevation Worship’s “You Are More Than Able” for her first fight with Chantelle Cameron, and Bethel Music’s “Raise a Hallelujah” for the rematch. Saturday’s pick came from that same Bethel catalog, which gives her final walk a quiet symmetry with the night she avenged the only loss of her professional career.
She has also worn Psalm 18 on her fight shorts for most of her career. Taylor has said her mother texted her the psalm when she was 17, before a major amateur tournament, and that she read it with tears running down her face because everything she needed for that fight was in it. The verse she points to is Psalm 18:32, about God arming her with strength. She has described it as a warrior psalm and as a mantra she returns to before every fight. For more than two decades, whatever else changed about her career, that stayed the same.
The fight itself went the way most people expected. Taylor beat unbeaten French challenger Flora Pili by unanimous decision over 10 rounds, with two judges scoring it 100-90 and the third 98-91. She retained her WBA, IBF and WBO super lightweight titles, known in the United States as junior welterweight, and picked up the vacant WBC belt to retire as an undisputed champion for the third time. Pili was game, took Taylor’s best work for 10 rounds and landed a clean head shot in the seventh that momentarily rocked her. She finished the night 12-1 and left with her reputation intact. Taylor closed her career at 26-1 at the age of 40, finishing the final 10 seconds with a flurry that suggested she was in no hurry for the bell.
The setting mattered as much as the result. Croke Park is the home of the Gaelic Athletic Association and had not hosted a boxing card since Muhammad Ali beat Alvin “Blue” Lewis there in July 1972 in front of 18,725 people. Taylor sold it out. Westlife performed, Aoife Scott and Róisín O sang “Grace,” and video tributes rolled in from Ed Sheeran, Bono, Niall Horan, Dermot Kennedy, Rory McIlroy, Padraig Harrington, Tyson Fury and others between fights. The event carried the motto “Once Upon a Time.” ESPN’s Chuck Culpepper, writing from Dublin, described a walk so long and so loud that it felt closer to a half marathon than a ring entrance.
Taylor, who rarely reaches for a microphone, took one afterward and asked to simply look around for a second before she spoke. She then thanked what felt like everyone who had ever helped her, starting with her father. “I’m blown away, to be honest. I’ve dreamed of this day for years now,” she told RTÉ Sport. “This is beyond my wildest dreams. I’m just so grateful. What a way to end this career.” She added that she did not think another country in the world would sell 80,000 tickets for a female athlete.
She started boxing at nine or ten years old in Bray, a coastal town south of Dublin, at a time when there was no women’s Olympic boxing division for her to aim at. She helped will one into existence and then won it. On the way out, in front of a stadium that had never headlined a woman before, she walked to a song she has been carrying around a lot longer than any of the belts. There are worse ways to be remembered than as the athlete who got the loudest night of her life and chose the quietest possible soundtrack for it.