When Team Ireland takes to the Seine in the Olympic Games opening ceremony on July 26th it will be all too easy amid the noise and the pageantry to forget that this group of young men and women have had to balance the demands of busy academic and working lives with gruelling training and competitive regimes to reach the pinnacle of athletic endeavour.
One Irish competitor who’ll be quite at home during the unique waterborne ceremony is Emily Hegarty, the history-making rower who was part of the coxless four team that took home Ireland’s first ever women’s rowing medal from the Tokyo Games. Since then, she’s managed to fit in a degree in physiology at UCC and recover from a back injury to take her place in the boat in Paris.
She took up rowing when she joined her local Skibbereen Rowing Club when she was just 11: “We live across the river from the rowing club and it made sense to join.”
Fitting in a busy training and competitive schedule with college studies is by no means easy.
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“The training for rowing is brutal,” says Hegarty. “Most days I am out at the National Rowing Centre [about 20 minutes from Cork city] by 8am. We have a steady session of between 24 and 32km in the mornings. That takes two and a half to three hours. There are gym sessions a few times a week and there are evening rowing sessions as well. We have about 16 sessions a week on water and land. As summer goes on, about half the morning sessions are racing preparation.”
She says the first few years were hard: “There were a few missed lectures but after a while I got to balance it. The college looked after me really well. I was on a scholarship through the Quercus Talented Students programme. I was a full-time rower in the year running up to the Olympics when they were run in 2021. The Department of Physiology in UCC gave me a lot of leeway. It was quite a shock to the system coming back from Tokyo when I hadn’t been a full-time student for a few years.”
That shock had physical impacts. “I became more susceptible to injury and illness,” Hegarty recalls. “I missed out on the racing season last year due to a back issue. That allowed me to study full-time. I got back in the boat in October 2023 and I’m rowing full-time at the moment. Training has been going well but we’re trying hard not to think about the outcome. I’m just glad to be back in the boat after the year I had.”
Hegarty is planning to do a masters in physiotherapy in King’s College London after the Olympics.
“When I do step out of the boat, I want to have a career,” she says.
Hockey player Ben Johnson also has one eye firmly trained on his career outside of sport. Having qualified with a degree in geography and geological sciences from UCD, he went on to do a masters in sustainable development in business at TU Dublin.
“I’m looking at moving into consultancy to help businesses with their net zero targets and climate policies,” he says.
Those career ambitions have been helped by the TU Dublin Athlete Support Programme.
“It gave me a fee waiver and that took a huge burden off my parents’ shoulders,” says Johnson. “The support structure has been incredible for someone who is very career driven like me. I was able to do the master’s thanks to support structure around me.”
Johnson has been playing hockey since he joined his local club in Waterford at the age of seven. He now plays with Three Rock Rovers in Dublin: “It’s a great club. I had played against them at underage level and knew the club well.”
Having been picked for the Irish Under 21s at age 18, he joined the senior men’s squad in 2019, just before the pandemic.
“We are able to train during Covid with Government permission,” he recalls.
His hockey career was interrupted by two serious knee operations in the past three years.
“I had a meniscus tear in my left knee in October 2019 and another tear in the right knee in March 2022.”
He came back to win his first senior cap in June 2022 and the schedule since then has been busy, to say the least.
“This year, I had to juggle my master’s alongside the senior men’s programme,” he says. “We had Olympic qualifiers in January, spent 27 days in India playing Pro League games and then spent time London and Antwerp for Pro League games. You have to have flexibility for that. Ethos Engineering, where I worked during my master’s, were great. They were very understanding about my hockey commitments.”
Johnson’s focus now is very much on Paris. “It’s just amazing to be named in the squad for the Olympics. But we’re not just turning up just to enjoy ourselves. We want to compete on the global stage.”
Kelly Murphy’s journey to the Irish women’s pursuit cycling team began almost by accident when she was studying for a master’s degree in neuroscience at the University of Birmingham.
“I bought a bike because of the bad public transport and I was racing against myself,” says Murphy. “I was studying for my PhD at the University of Aston when I was asked to cycle for a club.”
The Birmingham-born athlete qualifies to represent Ireland through her four Irish grandparents. Her performances at club level caught the attention of the Irish cycling performance director and she was asked to join the squad at its Mallorca base.
“I’m 34 now and I’ve been on the Irish squad for the past six years,” she says.
There is an almost Cool Runnings aspect to the team’s qualification for Paris. Despite Ireland’s long heritage in cycling, the country has no velodrome and absolutely no history in the pursuit category.
“I had never been to a velodrome or on a track bike before I went to Mallorca,” Murphy recalls. “Nobody told me how to stop. You can’t stop pedalling or you’ll fall down the bank, which is at a 40 degree incline.”
To qualify for the Olympics, a country has to be in the top 10 in the world and Ireland came through in ninth place.
“It’s a two-year qualification period and we’ve been lugging ourselves around the world for 10 qualifiers during that time,” Murphy explains.
I’m not flush but I have enough to get by. We’ll be a long time dead and I had give it a shot
— Kelly Murphy
Her PhD looked at using brain-imaging technology to deliver an objective and bias-free way to diagnose dyslexia. She intended to follow up that successful research project with postdoctoral studies but decided to devote herself full-time to cycling over the past two years. She plans to return to neuroscience after the games.
“It’s quite difficult to balance work with the Olympics. I’m 34 now and I’m only going to get one shot at it. I’ve given it my undivided attention for the past two years. We are funded quite well by Sport Ireland. I’m not flush but I have enough to get by. We’ll be a long time dead, and I had give it a shot.”
Angela Quinlan, managing director of Key Patent Innovations (KPI), one of five official partners of Team Ireland, expresses her admiration for these athletes.
“The ability to simultaneously balance performance as an elite athlete with degree studies or a career is an inspiration to us all as we work to balance the demands of our everyday lives with the demands of our work,” she says.
KPI was founded in 2020 with a view to developing a world-class IP monetisation platform.
“We invest in patent monetisation opportunities,” says Quinlan. “We invest in patents and make sure companies get some sort of payback for their R&D investment. They can use that to invest in other research. I used to do research, now I protect research.
“It’s easy to think of our athletes as superhuman but when you meet them you realise the challenges they face. They have to manage their nerves and try to perform in a suboptimal environment away from home where jet lag, climate, the surroundings of the athlete village and many other factors can impact them. We were struck by their resilience.
“This resonates with KPI where we often deal with high level negotiations after long flights, suffering from jet lag and living out of a suitcase. Like the athletes, the ability to prepare meticulously but not be thrown by unexpected is a key skill for us in our operations.”