Ellen Keane’s mojo is back with help from Kellie Harrington and Paralympic swimmer aims to raise roof in Paris

How could it not?

One of those who understood was Kellie Harrington. Keane had won Paralympic gold in Tokyo two years ago. Harrington won Olympic gold. Both were continuing to the 2024 Games in Paris, but at the midway point between the two Games, both found themselves devoid of their usual drive.

“I talked to Kellie about it,” says Keane. “I said, ‘I’m struggling so much’, she said it to me (too). Knowing there’s someone feeling the same as you is quite comforting.”

Harrington bounced back to win gold at the recent European Games, while Keane steadily clawed her way out of that motivational funk to prepare for her pivotal event of 2023 – this week’s Allianz Para Swimming World Championships in Manchester.

“I was battling through the first half of this year,” she says. “My team-mates have been so supportive, the staff. I started working with my sports psych a bit more to find that spark again. It’s the ebbs and flows of sport, trying to find the love for it. I was concerned I wouldn’t find it, but I have.”

Keane is 28, but this is her 17th season in the Irish senior team. She was 13 at her first Paralympics in Beijing in 2008, and she’ll be 29 come the Paris Games. That would be her fifth Paralympics – and her last.

“I know I wouldn’t be able to do that for another four years,” she says. “I love my sport and what it’s done for me, what it brings to communities and people, but I want to see what else I can do. There’s more to me than being a swimmer.”

She got to experience that last year, taking part in RTÉ’s Dancing with the Stars. “I was still swimming, but it wasn’t my main focus. Towards the end of the show, I was getting itchy feet. I couldn’t wait to get back.”

At the World Championships in Madeira last summer, Keane won silver in her signature event, the SB8 100m breaststroke. The Dubliner has European and Paralympic gold but has never stood atop the rostrum at the World Championships. On Sunday, she’ll have another chance.

“It would be nice to complete the collection, but I’m not naive to how good the girls are in my classification. I want to perform my best and if I do, potentially that could be a gold medal. But if I focus on the outcome, it gets a bit messed up. It’s all about the process, feeling good in my stroke, feeling speed.”

Her preparation has been laced with difficulty, an injury to the rotator cuff in her shoulder hampering her training for six weeks, limiting her ability to swim freestyle – a key part of her training.

“It still flares up a little, but we’re managing it quite well,” she says.

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The workload is intense. This is Keane’s full-time gig and she trains twice a day most days, covering 45km each week – or 900 lengths – in the pool in addition to gym sessions.

“It can feel quite lonely and isolating. I was struggling with that mentally as well,” she says.

“I’ve been on the senior team since 2007, I’ve seen so many people come and go and I’ve seen so many progress in other areas of their lives. I stayed to go to Paris and I realised three years is quite long, but now I’m feeling like myself again. I got my spark back.”

On a recent training camp in Fuerteventura, Keane’s form started to click and she’s in “really good shape” ahead of Sunday’s showdown. If she finishes in the top two, Keane will automatically qualify for the Paris Games. A top-eight finish will secure a female swimming slot for Ireland, but, as she notes, it’s “not necessarily an Ellen slot”.

That would mean her fate is uncertain until early next year when final places are allocated by the International Paralympic Committee.

“Then it’s a dogfight between team-mates,” she says.

Much easier, then, to nail her place here and now. Having been to the Tokyo Games, with all its eerie silence and empty stadiums, Keane would love to sign off her career in a packed arena in Paris.

“The Irish are such great supporters. The fact it’s so close means so many get to go over. Hopefully, we’ll be able to fill that stadium and raise the roof,” she adds.

That slump is firmly behind her, a potential fifth Paralympics back on the agenda, now just over 12 months away.

“I was questioning this year, ‘Why I did stay?’ But the closer it’s got to Paris, the more excited I get,” she says. “I have experienced a low this year, but I’m using that as motivation for World Champs. I’m at a high now, so I’ll keep poking the embers and keep that fire going.”

Ellen Keane was speaking as an ambassador for Allianz Insurance