As has become almost standard, Paul O’Donovan was once more adorned with a Gold Medal yesterday, winning the Men’s Lightweight Double Sculls alongside his latest partner in the boat Fintan McCarthy.
The race was televised live on RTÉ and they road a textbook race, moving up into second at the halfway point and maintaining their relentless stroke rate and speed through taking the lead at 1,500 metres and finishing with clear blue water between themselves and runners up Italy.
This was O’Donovan’s third European Championship Gold, to add to his Olympic Gold and Silver Medals and four World Championship titles. It is a haul that put him in the mix of being Ireland’s greatest ever sportsman.
Though even that is one which might in time be taken over by McCarthy who himself has now won four Major Titles, Two in Europe, One at the Worlds and his Tokyo Olympic Gold.
The next opportunity to add to this comes next month in the World Championships and while it is most likely the pair will unite again, O’Donovan is about to return to his medical studies and was non-committal after the race.
“I’ve to go back to school next week and I need all the time studying I can get so I won’t be failing all my exams and repeating next year, which is when I want to be off. So we’ll see about that.”
McCarthy has already graduated from UCC with his degree in Physiology but there was not as much training together this year due to O’Donovan’s focus on his studies.
Their rivals will take little comfort from that thinking that if they had uninterrupted training, it could have been even more impressive. Given that the first five home in Tokyo’s A Final and the first three in the B Final were all European teams makes this even more impressive an achievement.
The Gold was Rowing Ireland’s second success at the Games with Eimear Lambe, Tara Hanlon, Aifric Keogh and Natalie Long winning a silver medal in the Women’s Four on Saturday.
In addition to the two medals, there were also four fourth-place finishes in the A Finals, showing just how close the Irish team is across multiple boats to the very top of the sport.
Sport for Business member Whoop came on board as a partner in advance of the European Championships and it will be interesting to see what improvement might be wrung out of the in-depth knowledge that brings to athletes around their performance and recovery.
