CHAMPION KICKBOXER Caradh O’Donovan is flying out to Greece today for the European Championships.
She was forced to miss it two years ago due to illness and is keen to make up for lost time.
But the outcome of her campaign won’t be life or death to her. She’s already experienced something much closer to the real thing and its impact has changed her attitude towards what sport means for her.
After training through intermittent bouts of illness for two years, O’Donovan collapsed and was hospitalised in 2013. It was initially thought to be something minor but she was later diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and when the doctors assessed the damage, they were shocked at how she had coped with the symptoms without a diagnosis.
“I went in and had the tests,” O’Donovan told The42. “They didn’t think it was going to be anything too serious but when they got the results they said, ‘how are you still standing?’
“Normally with that amount of damage, people would complain a lot more but I was just thinking ‘suck it up it’s grand’.
“It just got to the stage where I had to stop. I was devastated that I had to pull out that year. I missed the European Championships two years ago so now I want to get back there and do it again.”
The mild side effects of the condition for O’Donovan range from vomiting to swelling of the wrists and ankles along with some inflammation. But the Sligo-born fighter has experienced the other side of the symptom scale as well.
“I think I was having carrot soup and the carrots hadn’t fully been blended and it got stuck so it took three or four days for it pass through,” she recalls.
It felt like someone was stabbing me in the stomach for those few days while I was on the morphine drips and being fed through a drip until it passed through. That scared the life out of me because you think you’re eating healthy stuff but there’s certain foods that I have to stay away from.”
The aftermath of her first encounter with the illness was a confusing time. She was forced to withdraw from kickboxing for almost a year and with no prior knowledge of Crohn’s disease, she feared that she would have to retire from the sport indefinitely.
But after taking the time to educate herself about the facts of the condition, she learned how manageable it can be.
“I’m on regular medication which has made a huge difference” she explains. “I take a humira needle every week and that keeps it at bay. I’m lucky that’s all permitted when it comes to the anti-doping side of things, I don’t even need to get a TUE for it but I have because you have to be really careful with what you take.”
O’Donovan competes in the -55kg point-scoring category and just like any other fighter, weight cutting is a process she must tailor to suit her individual needs. Crohn’s disease has inevitably dictated her approach to that aspect of her preparation but it just requires some precise planning.
“For the weight cut I have to be really careful so I can’t do what I did maybe ten years ago which was eat a lot of vegetables for a week because it would just totally flare up my Crohn’s so I have to be far more disciplined in making weight further away so I started my weight cut on 1 September when I started for this event.
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“You’re never really on weight with a week to go, I’m pretty close this week so I won’t eat any salt and drink lots of water and protein.”
The whole adjustment process has brought other changes into O’Donovan’s life and has provoked her to reassess the value she places on success in sport.
I have to make my sport not life or death like it used to be. If I couldn’t compete at something, I would be depressed for weeks whereas now, I missed a competition six weeks ago because I wasn’t well and I just have to say ‘that’s it, it’s one competition and there’ll be another one’.”
“It hasn’t changed my goals, I still want to be a world champion next year and it’s just another hurdle in the way. Everybody has them in different ways.”
O’Donovan was always sports inclined and was a self-confessed tomboy in her youth. She played basketball at schools level as well as dabbling in athletics but team sports were never her bag.
At the age of 12, she discovered kickboxing and that quickly became her only preference. She’s now a member of the same Tallaght club that has produced world and European champions in elite competition.
“I just fell in love with it. Basketball I found difficult in some ways because it’s a team sport and you’re relying on others and they’re relying on you which adds a deal of pressure to it but it was only at school level, there was never really any opportunities.”
She’s also a proficient blogger for sportswomen.ie. Writing was always something she enjoyed without necessarily having a huge passion for reading. Autobiographies are an interesting reads for her but as for fictional literature: “I just can’t get behind them because it’s not real.”
She doesn’t invest too much time in what she writes and has no trouble absorbing the critical comments that sometimes follow.
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“I just write whatever comes into my head and sometimes if I get really passionate about something, I might have to just tone it down. I tend to get more people reading the stuff that I put out that’s controversial. When you’re blogging, you’re opening yourself up and not everyone is going to agree with what you say. If I was too concerned with what other people think, I’d never do anything.”
The writing might be a past-time for the Sky Sports Athlete Mentor, but the focus she invests in her kickboxing is much more intense while still not allowing it to be too consuming. Her list of accomplishments include medal placings at national, European and world level but she never lingers on them for too long. A few medals are positioned around the house for motivation but as she puts it herself: “You’re as good as your last fight.”
Her dad and brother will also be in Greece over the coming days while O’Donovan competes at the WAKO (World Association of Kickboxing Organizations) European tournament, although they will be holidaying three hours away in Athens. Still, they may take a trip to see her perform.
Meanwhile, her mum insists on staying away from her fights after developing a fear of being a jinx when she happened to be at bouts where her daughter picked up an injury.
The nerves are due to arrive when she collects her draw card with her coach Dave Heffernan and she’s satisfied with how she’s prepared for the event. But whatever comes after that, she knows it won’t be life or death.
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