First it was medals, now legacy is creeping into the thinking of Katie-George Dunlevy. There is an abundance of the former, with the latter beginning to enter the conversation. Dunlevy will have a more serious discussion with herself following next week’s Para-cycle Road World Championships in Zurich.
But after the fireworks of Paris 2024 the most decorated Irish Paralympic athlete of all time is at a crossroads. As she tells it, the answer is in her aching bones, the wilfulness, the solitary training regime and the hunger that have always provided an edge to what she does.
The coming year will be one of self-discovery. She must divine if there is another Paralympic Games available to her 42-year-old body in four years’ time in Los Angeles.
Either way, Paris represented another triumph, with three more jewels encrusted on to her crown to bring her overall Paralympic medal haul to eight; four gold and four silver. In World Championship competition, Dunlevy has 15 medals – six gold, six silver and three bronze, from road and track. No other Irish athlete can touch those numbers, yet LA 2028 is no certainty.
“It’s whether I have that drive still in me,” she says. “To get to the top is hard but to stay at the top is much harder and I have been [there] for 10 years, ranked number one in the world on the road.
“It’s your whole life. Everything else is put to the side. You have to be very selfish. It’s you, training away on your own and you don’t have anyone around you. I wouldn’t have my coach with me. I wouldn’t have pilots with me. I’d be training months and months on my own, especially the year after the Paralympics.
“It’s whether I can train indoors for six months. That’s one of the things. I don’t want to do it halfheartedly. You have to give the extra bit because competition is fierce.”
Pilots are the eyes on the tandem racing bike on which Dunlevy competes. In Paris they were Linda Kelly and Eve McCrystal in her visually impaired B category. Her sight has been degrading since she was a child.
When she was not yet 12 years old, it was a routine visit to the optician that first revealed serious issues. English-born Dunlevy had worn glasses from the age of five. But that day was the first time she had heard the words retinitis pigmentosa. Further inquiry and a visit to a hospital in London confirmed the fears of her parents and the genetic disorder.
The cells in her retina were breaking down and over time her vision would deteriorate. Her family were told she could lose her sight by the age of 30, as many affected by the condition do, to the point of blindness.
On the Paralympic scale, hers is a B2 classification which is not as severe a visual impairment as B1 but more severe than B3. B2 is significantly and limited vision, either in how far or how wide one can see. The diagnosis changed the course of her life.
“I didn’t understand because I was used to seeing what I could see and didn’t know what everyone else could see,” she says. “It’s the same now. I know I can’t see some things and I’ll walk into stuff and kind of go, ‘Yeah, I can’t see well.’ I don’t know what everyone else can see so it’s [about] adapting.
“My family decided to send me to a special school in Kent for the visually impaired and blind. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want help. I didn’t understand what was going on. But the school was great. I was getting into activity and sport whereas the mainstream school I was in, I was left at the side of the PE class.”
At the new school, Dorton House, she was drawn towards physical activity, had high energy for “doing things”. Previously, she sat out PE because she ran into other kids or didn’t see the ball thrown to her. As a low-self-esteem child, the new situation was a confidence-giver and Dunlevy was driven towards competition.
First it was running and rowing, and at 17 Britain selected her for the Blind Sports European Championships, where she won bronze in 400m. At university in Southampton she became more serious about rowing and received a call from a British rowing coach to try out.
“Visually impaired. A woman. Sporty. I was like, well, okay, maybe,” she says. “I went and did a test indoors and then Iearned to row at my second year in uni.”
Several years were spent trying to push into British boats, and she did in 2004 and 2005. Then eventually a rib injury kept her out of the 2006 World Championships. The boat she missed won and she couldn’t break in for the 2010 World Championships. For the rest of the journey serendipity was at the tiller.
Ireland then was trying to get a rowing squad to qualify for London 2012 and Dunlevy’s dad John, being from Mountcharles in Co Donegal, provided an opportunity. In 2011 she did the trial and missed out. Again. Enough, she said to herself. She couldn’t take it any more.
However, paracycling coach Brian Nugent threw a lifeline. With her core strength and cardio, he asked if she wanted to try out cycling. A couple of months later Dunlevy arrived in Ireland. She tried out and was selected for the World Championships at the end of the year. It was 2014 and she was on her way.
A slew of World Championship and Paralympic medals later, her world is a different place.
“Every [Paralympic] cycle, the promotion and coverage, is so much better in the world [now] but also back in Ireland,” she says. “The number of athletes competing, and the number of women is increasing every Paralympic Games.
“Years ago, in Ireland you probably would not have been able to name a Paralympic athlete. But now you would. The communication is better. It is elite sport; we are just disabled. Visibility is important but there is definitely a long way to go. Not to put down any of the Olympians but they showcase them more.
I came out really late – at the age of 29. I denied it. I was very confused. I didn’t know what it was. The visibility wasn’t there as much as it is now
“I think you find at a lot of awards the Olympic medal would seem higher than a Paralympic medal, which shouldn’t be the case. So, a silver Olympic medal would be seen as something higher than a gold Paralympic medal. Right. You just go, eh, what do you need to do as a Paralympic athlete to been seen? So, there are barriers.”
Dunlevy seems more acutely aware of the “legacy” element now as she faces into a brief stint of training leading towards Zurich.
Her first World Championships in an Irish vest was a road race in Greenville, USA, in 2014. Since then she has won medals every year on the road and track, at Paralympic or World Championship level. That Zurich may be her last has sharpened her mind to other things.
It will, she says, come down to a feeling, a desire. Only she will know when her body and mind are telling her to stop, if the same levels of vitality and drive are there to allow her not to just step out and compete against the best in the world but to beat them.
“I’m getting old now,” she says. “I’m 42 years old. I haven’t got the same energy and my recovery is very different to what it used to be. I’m managing injuries all the time, so you are putting energy into that as well as getting yourself into the best physical shape. I’d be in pain most days. It just takes its toll on the body.
“But one of the reasons to carry on is definitely to inspire visually impaired children and the LGBT community, just to give anyone hope to be themselves.”
Dunlevy says she wants “to give back”.
“I want to go to schools – and will do in a few weeks – to show my medals to the children and let them hold my medals because I didn’t have that as a kid,” she says. “If I can inspire anyone just not to give up, that’s my job done. It will have been worth it.
ByIn her own estimation, she “came out really late – at the age of 29″.
“Coming out, I denied it. I was very confused. I didn’t know what it was,” she recalls. “The visibility wasn’t there as much as it is now. It wasn’t in schools or anything and there was no one around me like that. So, I thought that I have to be going out with boys and I have to marry a man, so I hid it even though my family are amazing.
“So, if I can help people out there to be themselves ... I know I’m very fortunate and know not everyone has that support in their lives and don’t have a supporting family. It can be very lonely.”
Exhausted and back in Crawley, the town in West Sussex where she lives, the competitive fires still burn. Paris barely over, Dunlevy is instinctively thinking of a recovery ride on the bike. Her return to Ireland for a homecoming with the recent gold and two silver medals, and a lack of sleep, are the sweeter pains of success.
After a planned Late Late Show appearance on Friday night and the World Championships, there is also talk of a trip to southwest Donegal where she spent childhood holidays with her five sisters in Mountcharles.
Only then can she sit back after a life of competition and heaped gold medals and ask herself the question of what to do next.
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