From school to the pool: The Limerick teenage prodigy aiming for Paris glory

Limerick’s 18-year-old para-swimming world champion Roisín Ní Ríain is now a first-year scholarship student at the University of Limerick, studying to be a science teacher while clocking up 20 hours a-week in the pool.

Yet she says the move to third-level has actually made her training more manageable.

“With a visual impairment I can’t drive so getting to live on campus is wonderful and definitely makes my life easier. I can walk to my college classes and am just five minutes from the pool.

“I’m also living with other swimmers. It’s really nice to live with my friends and teammates who are also like-minded athletes with pretty similar schedules. We’re all focussed and all up early in the morning and to bed early in the evening.”

That means rising at 5:45am five mornings a-week, turning in between nine to 10pm nightly and only taking Sundays off training.

But her proximity to UL’s 50m pool, where she has been a long-time member of Swim Ireland’s elite training hub, means the versatile teenager now gets an extra hour’s sleep daily compared to the early dawn trips she used to make from her family home in Drombanna.

She has just made a brilliant start to the season, winning five gold medals at the Citi World Series in Melbourne where Ireland’s top para-swimmers all raced after an early season training camp in Australia.

She is already, like Daniel Wiffen, a world-record holder; setting the S13 200m backstroke short-course record (2:21.20) at Swim Ireland’s National Championships in 2022 and the long-course equivalent (2:25:23) at the World Series in Berlin last year.

Ní Ríain reached five finals in six events when she made her Paralympic debut in Tokyo in 2021 when she had just turned 16.

That was actually only her second international competition which gives some indication of her medal potential this summer.

That has clearly been recognised by VISA who have just made her a brand ambassador - two months before her 19th birthday – and the only Irish athlete in their star-studded portfolio of 56 athletes competing in the Paris Olympics and Paralympics.

“It was nice to get in such high-quality competition so early in the season, especially as it’s such a long season for us with the Games not until the end of August,” she said of her recent success Down Under.”

“I’m very excited to be part of Team Visa,” she said. “This is the biggest and most diverse team that they have ever had and, for me, it’s so exciting to be part of a team that values inclusivity and diversity which I champion myself.