Standing on a podium together for the final time, Eve McCrystal reached out for Katie-George Dunlevy’s right hand and in unison they punched through the muggy air inside the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Vélodrome.
Having spent 10 years beautifully in sync, there was no point changing the habit of a sporting lifetime right at the very end.
On Sunday, in their last ride together as a tandem pair, they claimed their sixth Paralympic Games medal, winning silver in the B 3,000m individual pursuit to sit alongside the two golds and one silver won in Tokyo, plus the one gold and one silver mined from Rio.
Both cyclists will also compete on the road later in these Games but they will not be on the same bike. This was the end. Sunday brought the curtain down on one of the great Irish sports partnerships, and it ended in a very un-Irish way – successfully.
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Having earned a place in the gold-medal race with one of the best rides of their storied career during the qualifiers, they subsequently led for much of the final against Britain’s Sophie Unwin and Jenny Holly.
Dunlevy and McCrystal still had their noses in front after 2,000 metres, but the British pair delivered a storming finish to reel in the Irish duo over the closing laps and win by 2.166 seconds.
Dunlevy and McCrystal posted a time of 3:21.315, with Unwin and Holly coming home with a 3:19.149 after an epic final. But there was no dejection from those in green afterwards. If anything there was gratitude they got to go out on such terms, racing all the way to the line.
When it was over the Irish pair circled the velodrome on a lap of honour before embracing family and friends at the side of the track.
Gold would have been great, but the colour of the medal was almost incidental. A podium had seemed beyond them leading into the event. Dunlevy had suffered a broken collarbone in May and there was an unspoken sense in cycling circles that perhaps their halcyon days had come and gone.
[ Katie-George Dunlevy and Eve McCrystal are golden again in the Tokyo rainOpens in new window ]
And yet, here they were again. Punching upwards, the only way they have ever known.
“We’re like sisters, we fall in, we fall out, we have a lot of respect for each other,” said McCrystal, who at the age of 46 is retiring as a Para pilot after these Games.
What they have achieved together will ultimately outlast both of their careers. On and off the track, something special happened in their fusion.
“We have gone through some really tough times together,” added Dunlevy.
“You don’t really go through that with anyone else, really, we know what we have gone through and what they are giving, and mentally and emotionally what they have gone through.
“There are times when we have been training individually but we always come back together and we know we have been training hard at home.
“And we have a special bond which we will have forever, those memories and special moments, nobody else will know what that feels like except for me and Eve.”
At the end of the podium presentation, they again clenched hands and waved to the crowd.
“We’re 10 years together, it took us a few years to get to the top,” added McCrystal. “It’s really hard to get to the top and it’s fricking harder to stay there. You have so much pressure. I don’t think we ever felt external pressure from people but it was pressure that both of us felt to stay there. That’s just so hard to do as an athlete.
“When the two of you are together you constantly don’t want to let each other down so you’re fighting every single day – that’s the fight for the last three years coming out there in a medal.
“We’ve always just trusted each other. Even with her collarbone, I was like, ‘She’ll be back.’ Collarbone, whatever.”
At that, she smiles over at Dunlevy, who returns with a knowing grin. After a crash during a road race in Italy in May, Dunlevy required surgery and raced on Sunday with four pins and a plate in her left collarbone.
She drags her top down off her shoulder to show the scar.
“I could get them removed, but I don’t know,” she added.
“At first when I did it, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I really didn’t know [if I’d make Paris]. But then I just thought, ‘It is the arm, I didn’t break my hip or my leg’. I could still pedal with one arm, so I just got on with it. It could have been worse.”
It could hardly have ended much better.
