SOME OF THE fine print if you want to be an Olympic rower: you have to achieve your dreams twice for everyone else to recognise it once.
First you have to qualify the boat for the Games, and then you have to earn your place within it. For Paris 2024, Fintan McCarthy has done the first part, courtesy of his and Paul O’Donovan’s qualification for September’s world final in the lightweight men’s double skull.
But now he and O’Donovan must prove to Rowing Ireland they are the best duo for the boat by the time the five-ringed circus comes around. McCarthy has done it once before, unseating Paul’s brother Gary – who was struggling with a wrist injury – in 2019 and winning gold at the world championships. Olympic gold famously followed in Tokyo, but only after McCarthy held off Gary’s challenge at nerve-shredding, high-calibre final trials in late spring.
“It was quite intense, but that atmosphere is really cool: you have to be as fast as you can there as otherwise you’re not going to the Olympics”, McCarthy tells The 42. “So it’s a case of wanting to put your body on the line to secure that spot so you can do it all over again a few months later.
“It was definitely stressful waiting. It would have been on the fourth day [of trials] they called us in to show us the results and say, ‘We think this is the best way forward.’”
That decision was vindicated: where Paul and Gary won silver in Rio, Paul and Fintan won gold in Tokyo.
“It’s definitely the best high I’ve ever had”, says McCarthy of the moment he and Paul crossed the line in the Olympic final. It was also an opportunity to swap instant analysis for celebration.
“When it’s over, it’s like a few seconds of ,’Okay, race is over’, and a lot of the time then you start analysing, ‘Oh, well I need to do this better next time, and next time’”, he says.
“That’s nearly the best time to do it, as it’s fresh in your mind. I’m not sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, the 17th stroke wasn’t great’, but it’s more, ‘Oh the rhythm was really good and I need to do that again’, or else it’s, ‘Maybe it wasn’t good and I need to do something differently.’”
“But when it’s an Olympic final, it hits you. ‘That’s it. There’s no next time for a long time. This is the pinnacle, this is what it has all been for.’ That’s when my arms go up and I start screaming. ‘It’s done, and I’ve reached the goal.’”
So if there are no worlds left to conquer, best to start over and conquer them again.
“It was great,” reflects McCarthy on Tokyo. “And it gets better with age. I am quite a sentimental and nostalgic person so I’d be thinking back to when I was 16 and 17 and God, that was all I wanted. That was all I wanted for however many years, I had been rowing maybe eight years then. That is all I wanted and I did it. There’s little moments like that, it’s good. But I do want to do it again. I can’t place my finger on why, exactly.”
Tokyo isn’t all gloamy memories for McCarthy: it also serves to inject him with confidence; it stands as a sound argument against any self-doubt.
“I won’t lie: sometimes it does get on top of me”, he says. “Confidence for me is a big thing. Sometimes for me there’s a question mark: ‘Oh well, it’s all just a fluke.’”
Sometimes, he admits, he finds reasons to wrongly discredit his own success. “I have had good timing on my side for a good few years”, says McCarthy. “[His brother] Jake has had some really hard injuries, it was the same with Gary in 2019. I have timed my peak quite well, which does feed into that thing, ‘Maybe it’s a fluke.’”
But of course it’s not a fluke, and McCarthy now has enough evidence to persuade even himself of that fact. He has an Olympic gold medal, three word titles and two European titles, but he also has training data stretching back seven years, which him a constant reference point for the extent of his improvement and proof of peaks that follow troughs.
“I am getting better at being confident and believing in myself”, he says. “I do know how to move a boat and win gold medals! It’s not like it’s just fallen into my lap, I have worked for it.
“Initially it started out, ‘Oh I’ve got in this year as this or that happened.’ For a long time, especially when I was younger, that maybe scared me a little bit. That it was just a flash in the pan and would be gone again in the next year. But it also motivated me to train harder and get better.
“I do look back to a) see how far I’ve come, and b) if I do have a bad result, I’ll look at training data from where I am now and [compare it to] previous years when I did well. I can say, ‘The training data is similar so you can’t be that far off. It was just a bad day, or you didn’t sleep well the night before’, and come up with a reason. Before I would have thrown all sense to the wind, ‘You might as well not even try.’”
McCarthy unseated Paul’s brother to earn his first Olympic medal, and to win his second, he will have to fend off the challenge of his own brother, Jake, at next year’s final trials.
“We haven’t had a serious conversation about it”, says Fintan about the rivalry with his brother. “We operate differently in that regard. I come from it in the sense of, ‘Okay, I hope I will be in it, and I hope I’ll be competing’ whereas he is very much, ‘Well, it could be me in the boat. What are you talking about?’
“He is really confident. We are quite competitive with each other, but he is more competitive. I try and stay chilled and relaxed, and he will be analysing everything and asking, ‘Well, how hard were you pushing today?’
“At the end of the day, you are happy for your brother to succeed. I wouldn’t be bitter in any way, to be honest. I’d be happy if he achieved what he set out to achieve, which is what he has done for me for how many years.”
Not that it will blunt anybody’s competitive edge. Blood, it seems, isn’t so thick when everyone’s out on the water.
Fintan McCarthy is a brand ambassador for PTSB, proud sponsor to Team Ireland at both the Paralympic and Olympic Games in Paris next summer.
