Prof Moira O'Brien started working with athletes as the official Olympic doctor before the Moscow Games in 1980, running fitness tests on a bike in the bathroom of Dr Austin Darragh's unit in St James's Hospital.
It was the first time athletes had been tested in this way and, when she moved to Trinity as head of the Department of Anatomy in 1985, Prof O'Brien set up the Human Performance Laboratory, bringing in the State's first isokinetic machine for measuring muscle strength.
In 1992, she took delivery of Ireland's first Dexa machine for measuring bone density. Athletes had been presenting with stress fractures caused by over-training, but the machine is also available to the public, with a six-month waiting list for scans to diagnose the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis.
Athlete testing is just one of the services offered by this frenetically busy facility, which is still headed by Prof O'Brien, though at the age of 70 she has officially retired.
Bernard Donne, the senior experimental officer for the self-funded facility, undertakes most of the athlete testing, runs the lab and supervises the majority of the sports medicine projects.
Fitness assessments are only available to serious athletes, with the Irish Sports Council funding testing for elite athletes, who can also be tested at the NCTC in Limerick.
The Trinity assessment involves a full medical, during which age, gender, height, weight, body fat, blood pressure, heart rate and lung function are all charted by a doctor prior to the athlete undergoing the fitness test to forestall any potential problems brought on by physical exertion.
During the fitness test itself, which can be carried out on a treadmill, rowing machine or bike, a full range of metabolic data is drawn up, establishing the VO2 max XXXX XXX, blood lactate levels, respiratory exchange rate and heart rate, so that training programmes can be fine-tuned to allow the athlete to peak at exactly the right time for success.