Nhat Nguyen
Nhat Nguyen will represent Team Ireland in the men’s singles badminton event at the Olympic Games in Paris. It’s the 24-year-old Dubliner’s second Games, having made his debut at Tokyo. It marks the culmination of years of hard work and discipline but also of an inner resilience that he had to display long before he ever picked up a racket.
Nguyen’s journey to the Games began in Vietnam. He spent his early childhood in a village outside Hanoi with his mother and sister. When he was six years old the trio relocated to Belturbet, Co Cavan, where his father, a chef, had been working for a number of years. It wasn’t an easy transition.
“It was tough times – challenging – because everything was just different,” says Nguyen. “It took a long time to get used to the language. I started in second class and then had to go back and do first class again, starting from zero and just learning one or two basic words every day.”
No sooner had he adjusted than the family moved to Dublin. His father was a keen badminton player and initially Nguyen saw the sport simply as a way to spend time with him.
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“He had left to go to Ireland three or four years before we moved so I didn’t remember him. I was playing just to play with my dad, just to have fun, so that was how I started,” he says.
He continued playing, just for fun, until a coach in Baldoyle spotted his ability. By the time he was a young teenager he was competing against, and beating, much older players.
But it wasn’t natural ability alone that brought him success; hard work played a part too, Nguyen recalls: “From about 13 or 14 it was homework, training for two hours a day, then bed – rinse and repeat.”
Despite a strong debut at the Tokyo Games in 2021, the following year saw his game hit a difficult patch.
“There was a period in late 2022 when I wasn’t performing well,” he says. “I felt really stuck, like I was hitting a plateau. My game was not improving. For maybe six months in a row I hadn’t won a game. It really hit my confidence.”
The only way forward was to strip his game down to its component parts and rebuild it, which he did, winning the Irish Open in a spectacular comeback the following year.
Ninety-nine per cent of what he does is “grind and hard work”, he says, “but that 1 per cent joy of jubilation makes it all worth it.”
Paul O’Donovan
Cork rower Paul O’Donovan is competing in the lightweight men’s double event in Paris. The 30-year-old Skibbereen native has been rowing since he was six.
He and brother Gary won Ireland’s first Olympic rowing medal – silver – in the same event in 2016 and he is a four-time world champion, two in lightweight single, in 2016 and 2017, and two in lightweight double, with Gary in 2018 and with his current partner Fintan McCarthy in 2019.
With such a record in his wake, it’s nice to know he’s only human too. Growing up on his parents’ dairy farm he could not be relied on to do the morning milking.
“I’m not great at early mornings, I tended to do the evenings instead,” he admits.
There’s no time for milking now. He trains twice a day. But punishing schedules are his stock in trade. Alongside his performance as world class sportsperson, he notched up degrees in physiotherapy and medicine too.
He swats away the achievement: “Medicine is not the hardest degree. Certainly, there’s a lot of volume of things to learn but it’s not that complicated and I suppose what’s hard for people kind of depends on what their aptitudes are and think I just had an aptitude for working hard.”
Rowing taught him that lesson. “With rowing you have to put in an awful lot of hours, so I just started applying that work ethic to my studying as well,” he explains.
Success isn’t all about goals, O’Donovan points out; it’s about enjoyment too. “I wouldn’t say I’m goal oriented so much as somehow or other I ended up in fields that I really enjoy working hard in. Once you start to take an interest in anything, the deeper you get into it and the more fun it becomes,” he says.
Despite his achievements, O’Donovan will not let success define him. “I’d say most of the goals I’ve ever set myself since I was a young age I’ve probably failed to achieve. It’s hard to look at it that way and say that only if I reach my goals will I be satisfied, because it would mean I’d have a fairly miserable existence,” he says.
“If you’re defining yourself off the goals that you hope to attain, you’ll probably never get there. And even if you do, you’ll realise it’s not all it’s cracked up to be and you’ll probably be disappointed anyway. I think once you just find a way to be happy and satisfied with what you’re doing every day, you’re more likely to work hard at it and make progress and get close to your goals, but you kind of know it’s not just about the end result either.”
Certainly, don’t measure your worth by either success or failure. “You have no control over a lot of it so why would you try and define yourself by things you have no control over?” O’Donovan asks.
Ger Mitchell
Ireland’s Olympic and Paralympic teams are sponsored by PTSB. It has launched a major advertising campaign, The Human Behind the Athlete, based on the idea that most of us look upon our athletes as if they were superhuman, their only role being to go out and represent Ireland.
But as title sponsor, PTSB’s understanding of what these athletes go through runs deeper, explains Ger Mitchell, the company’s CHRO and corporate development director. As well as strength and discipline, it’s a journey that involves obstacles, resilience and the ability to bounce back.
“It’s about us recognising that athletes don’t come out of thin air. It’s not about just turning up on the starting blocks in Paris; it’s all the years of work they put in to get there,” says Mitchell
The Human Behind the Athlete campaign resonates with PTSB’s own brand values, best encapsulated in its customer promise “altogether more human”.
Most of us never get to see the back stories behind our athlete’s successes, says Mitchell: “Whether it’s Nhat coming here with his mother, not really remembering his father and not having the language, or Paul studying medicine while also trying to maintain his status as an Olympic champion, it’s all the things that go into making them that counts.
“They don’t just arrive to the court or the regatta fully made. It’s everything they go through in preparation, including the personal stuff.”
Indeed, it’s what really makes Team Ireland athletes great role models for the rest of us.
“It’s about the lessons we can take from their determination, dedication, perseverance and sacrifice, and bring into our own lives,” says Mitchell.
