Inside the medal factory

He took the first tricolour he was offered and greeted everyone with a rapturous fist bump, until he reached Aoife Casey and Margaret Cremen at the end of the line. A couple of hours earlier, Casey and Cremen had finished eighth in their first Olympics, a remarkable performance from such an inexperienced crew. Cremen grew up in Cork city, McCarthy and Casey shared a childhood in Skibbereen, and when they joined the high performance programme they all moved into a house in Ovens, near the rowing centre. McCarthy’s twin brother Jake was the fourth rower in the house, all of them committed to this tide in their lives. McCarthy wrapped Casey and Cremen in a hug until their three heads were touching in a circle, and for 20 seconds none of them stirred.

A few yards away Aifric Keogh, fresh from her bronze 24 hours earlier in the women’s four, the shifted her sunglasses and dabbed away some tears. In the absence of family, all of these people in green polo shirts at the barricade were next of kin.

Though they travelled as a team, each of them had a personal journey. At the beginning of 2019 Eimear Lambe was ready to plunge into the high performance programme. Lambe’s older sister Claire had been part of the programme for years. Alongside Sinead Lynch in Rio, they became the first female crew from Ireland to reach an Olympic final, but after those Games they both left the water.

In their wake was a generation of youngsters, and a new director of high performance. Antonio Maurogiovanni brought an iron mentality and a training programme from hell. “With this programme, you suffer doing it, and you’re lucky to get through unscarred really,” said Aileen Crowley. “We’ve all gotten very big injuries at some point. But I suppose if you get out the other side, like we all have — l mean we got to the Olympics, and that’s what we wanted.”

Elite rowers exist on a diet of pain, but this was unlike anything the athletes in the Irish system had experienced before. When Claire Lambe saw the programme first she thought it was “insane”; for six months Eimear wondered if she could endure it.

“I found it difficult to get on board with the programme” she says. “It was a lot of long hours and slogging. When I came down to Cork full-time I got a rib stress injury quite quickly [from the training load].

“I was trying to keep up with the fuelling involved as well. You’re burning 4,000 or 5,000 calories a day, and I just had no perception really of what that was in terms of food, and how I was meant to eat that amount. So I kind of fell behind with that.”

The eating was ceaseless: breakfast, a second breakfast, a meal they called “pre-lunch” and then lunch, dinner, supper, snacks. After each session they consumed a shake that contained 600 calories. The petrol gauge in their bodies was always twitching towards red.

“It’s such a weird thing. I’m always saying to my friends, ‘I can’t wait to stop rowing so that I can stop eating.’ Dinner would be as much pasta or rice as I can fit on my plate. I’d be putting on sauces and sour cream. I know some of the guys would melt butter into their pasta sauce.

“Phil [Byrne] I know can’t go to bed until he has eaten at least a litre of ice cream. The boys would be on 6-8,000 calories a day, so every night he tries to eat a tub of Ben and Jerry’s before he goes to bed. He’d be sitting on the couch saying, ‘I can’t go to bed until I finish this otherwise I won’t be able to do the training tomorrow.’ I eat before bed too because otherwise you’d wake up in the middle of the night hungry.”

She struggled to settle in Cork at first. In her life, rowing had always been in rhythm with college and friends; now it dominated every day. In the evenings she was so hollowed out from training that she had no mind to do anything.

“I didn’t know any of the girls really that well. Everyone was quite close and they had such lifetime experiences, and they were talking about, like, the World Champs of 2018 and World Cups gone by and I wouldn’t have a clue. I was really lucky that the girls made such an effort with me, which is hard to do I’d say. It’s always kind of tough when you’re in a highly competitive environment, and you see another person coming in to add to the stress of it. Luckily they looked past that and decided I could be their friend.”

Before the crew was nailed down it was a strange dynamic: team-mates and rivals. At one stage, before Christmas, eight of them were trying to qualify two boats for the Olympics: a four, and a pair. And then Lambe was flattened with Covid. She went home to Dublin on December 23 and went for a test four days later, coughing.

“I was so surprised by how hard it hit me. I was sick and exhausted. Sport Ireland had a protocol in place to try to prevent any long Covid. I was raring to go after about two weeks, but then I had to wait for another week of having absolutely no symptoms before I could actually return to training — and even then I was only allowed to do ten minutes at a time.

“I’d be going for walks and I’d look at my heart rate and it would be 140, 150, just going for walks. Normally it would be less than 100. It was staggering. It was kind of hard just seeing all the progress that I’d made before Christmas, just disappearing in a week or two.”

From left, Keogh, Lambe, Murtagh and Hegarty celebrate their bronze in the women’s four

INPHO/MORGAN TREACY

When she got back on the water Lambe’s times were four or five seconds behind the others. Before the final trials, she had a month to catch up. Nobody could tell how that process would work out. They kept trying different combinations, open-minded and unsure. One Saturday morning in March, Lambe, Keogh, Fiona Murtagh and Emily Hegarty all received a text. They were the next cab off the rank. None of them saw it coming. Immediately, it felt good.

“There are days when the boat just kind of runs under you, and it feels easy, but the boat is still moving fast. You can feel the speed as it runs. We definitely had that, pretty much off the bat. At the same time, we hadn’t done a race yet.” Coming to Tokyo, they knew they had a medal chance. In an interview, a couple of weeks before the Games, Keogh said it, straight out. In April, just weeks after they had come together as crew, they won silver at the Europeans, and because women’s four was new to the Olympics, there were just ten boats in the field. Then, in the biggest race of their lives, they blew the start.

“I thought we were goosed. I had a glance and I could see that the other boats had shot up ahead and I was like, ‘Oh no.’ I know we have a weak start and I know we’re an aerobic crew — I had to put that thought out of my head straight away. I knew our second 1k would be faster.

“Aifric was calling where we were relative to the other boats. She said we were fourth but in fact at the time we were fifth. Thank God she said fourth because then I was like, ‘Ok, we’ve still got a hope here.’ Out of the corner of my eye we could see Team GB and we knew we were faster than GB.”

In the boat it is Lambe’s role to focus everyone’s minds during the race, and make strategic calls. Most of it is technical stuff, a quick phrase that cues a familiar thought. Before every race, they thrash out the tactical possibilities, so that everything is clear. Lambe, though, has licence to think freely and react. Normally they start their kick 500 metres out; on Wednesday Lambe knew they couldn’t wait. At 750 she had the guts to make a judgment call, so she roared in their ears: “Wind it up, wind it up.”

Without that call, they were sunk.

Fintan McCarthy wasn’t flagged from a distance. He didn’t arrive at speed. For a while, his talent was obscured. In 2015, around the time when Paul and Gary O’Donovan qualified a boat for the Rio Olympics, McCarthy went to the World Under-23 championships in Bulgaria. He was only 18 years of age, not long after sitting his Leaving Cert, competing in his first major championships. It didn’t go well. He remembers sitting with his Dad in a restaurant in Plovdiv, sifting delicately through the wreckage.

“I came 18th in the single. It wasn’t great. My Dad was just kind of saying, ‘You’re doing a lot of training, and you’re coming 18th, is this what you want to do?’ Sure, I knew how much I could improve. The main thing was that I didn’t want to leave it at that, to have my only World Championships be a total disaster. Me and Dominic [Casey, his coach] knew there was more to come.”

A year later, when the O’Donovan brothers won silver in Rio, McCarthy watched the race in a pub in Skibbereen. He knew them; they were neighbours in the townland of Aughadown, just as Dominic Casey was, and Emily Hegarty. They moved, though, in a different orbit: Gary was five years older than McCarthy, Paul was nearly three.

He remembers going to a training camp in Seville, at the end of the 2017, with his brother Jake and the O’Donovan brothers, and the gap was obvious to all of them. The younger pair hadn’t enough miles in their legs. It was too soon. By the middle of 2019, though, everything had changed. Gary’s form had slipped. There are always trials to fill the competition boats for the summer regattas, but the O’Donovan pairing hadn’t been challenged seriously in four years.

That summer, there were trials before the World Cup season and before the World Championships: both times the boat was faster when McCarthy was Paul O’Donovan’s partner. The next threshold he had to cross was in his mind.

“It was a strange one,” he said. “I think my body was ready before my mind was, if that makes sense. It’s a bit like impostor syndrome, really. It’s like a mistake, or something, that it happened. I suppose then, you have to look at the times you’ve done, and the training. When you can see it all on paper, it makes it a bit easier. Like, ‘OK, well, I deserve to be here, and I should be in boat.’”

Paul O’Donovan is the greatest rower that Ireland has ever produced, but McCarthy has brought the boat to another level. In the semi-final, they set a world record without killing themselves. A day later, when they needed extra reserves of speed in a flat-out finish, those reserves were available.

There were two of them in it: two halves of one.