Two years ago, Mona McSharry found herself physically and mentally worn out by swimming. At the 2022 European Championships in Rome, a year after making the Olympic final in Tokyo, she was secretly praying she wouldn’t make another final, and face the unbearable tension and expectation that would come with it.
“I was actually jumping for joy because I was done, the season was over,” she said earlier this year. “I’d come to the conclusion that I hated swimming, really disliked it.”
Much of that expectation McSharry was putting on herself, given her already unique medal tally in Irish swimming – and holder of Irish records in 14 events, seven individual and seven as part of relay teams.
She started swimming competitively at age seven in the Community Games. Then from her early teenage years growing up in the small Sligo hamlet of Grange, near the ocean at Mullaghmore, she was being labelled as the future of Irish swimming, soon winning national senior titles with Marlins Swim Club in Ballyshannon, and just missing the Rio Olympics in 2016, aged 15.
She won a European junior gold in the 50m and 100m breaststroke in 2017, and in the same year won world junior gold in the 100m breaststroke, all the while being encouraged and driven to those endless early-morning training sessions by her parents, Aidan and Viola.
In 2019, McSharry and her family also featured on RTÉ's Fittest Family series, winning outright.
Then slowly and suddenly it all became too much. Less than a year after making that Olympic final in Tokyo in the 100m breaststroke, as a 20-year-old – the first Irish swimmer to reach that stage since Michelle Smith de Bruin in Atlanta in 1996 – McSharry was on the verge of quitting, suffering a personal crisis of confidence.
She had already made up her mind that she would finish out that 2022 season, and if things didn’t improve, she was done. It was unquestionably the low point in her four years on a swimming scholarship at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville.
“I took a really long break, went home for a little bit, kind of chilled,” she said, “didn’t train at all at the end of August, start of September, and made the decision with my coach. I’d been speaking to my coach [Matt Kredich] about this at this point, that I wasn’t ready to be done. But I had to try and change something.”
That experience might well have ended McSharry’s Olympic journey, but instead it became the making of it, when inside the Paris La Défense Arena on Monday, she won her magnificent bronze medal in one of the closest ever finishes in a championship 100m breaststroke.
Coming into Paris, she already felt liberated from those previously pressurised times. She went into the 2023 season hungry again, and with a more relaxed mindset. It paid dividends. She swam to three podium finishes at the NCAA Championships in Knoxville, before finishing just 0.13 of a second off bronze at the World Championships in Fukuoka in 2023, having held second going into the last 10m.
She followed that with a hat-trick of gold medals at the European Under-23 Swimming Championships in Dublin in August.
Then she finished fifth again at the 2024 Championships in Doha in February, in both the 100m and 200m breaststroke, only by then the only real target for 2024 was to make the Olympic medal podium.
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“I’ve been telling myself that I’m going for a medal all year,” she said on Monday night. “And honestly this was in the plan way back when I sat down with my coach Grace Meade [in Ballyshannon] in maybe 2015. And we said that 2020 [Tokyo 2021] was the ‘feeler’ Olympics and 2024 would be the one where we get stuff done.
“Those moments where I thought I was done really put into perspective what I really do this for, and this is a huge bonus.
“But there are so many other things like that become a part of this, like training and watching my friends compete, and being able to see myself progress and get better. And then you do have bonus moments like this, where you get to stand up on the podium and watch your flag raised at the Olympic Games.”
She’ll be back in the pool on Wednesday morning for the heats of the 200m breaststroke, her remarkable Olympic journey far from finished yet.
