Sickening Body Blow – Johnny Sexton Reveals Paddy Barnes Once Dropped Famous Rugby Star

‘Wee’ Paddy Barnes once dropped a not-so-small Irish rugby international so heavy he threw up.

Back in 2012 a number of the High Performance squad joined the Irish Rugby Squad for some training at Carton House.

The likes of Olympic medal winners Barnes, Kenneth Egan and Michael Conlan were among the boxers were present alongside Declan Kidney’s Irish team.

Reminiscing about the sessions on the Free State podcast to Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning, Johnny Sexton recalled an incident were two-time Olympic bronze medal winner, Barnes did some damage.

The Belfast favourite landed a body shot mid-shadow-boxing prompting an unnamed rugby star to fall to the floor and throw up.

“We had the Olympic boxing team come in and we’d been out the night before, sort of team bonding two weeks out out from a big international,” explained Sexton.

“We’d been out and first of all their coach was shocked. They wouldn’t drink for a year, six months, two years probably before an Olympic event, but he said to us ‘we’d love to show you a bit of training’.

“Paddy Barnes was there, (Michael) Conlan, Katie Taylor wasn’t there on the day, but they had like probably ten boxers there so anyway they got ten volunteers from the rugby team to go in and start doing this.

“A few of the lads had been out the night before, but then they were shadow boxing and Paddy Barnes hit one of the lads in the guts and he spewed everywhere. It was absolutely brilliant.”