– Niall Kelly reports from Lagoa Stadium, Rio de Janeiro
HOW SWEET THIS must be for Gary and Paul O’Donovan.
Not just to win an Olympic silver medal and make Irish rowing history, but to do it arm in arm with your brother.
For a little over six-and-a-half minutes in Lagoa Stadium on Friday, where the early-morning weather was more Ballincollig than Brazil, the O’Donovans were perfectly in tune.
Stroke after stroke.
Gary in the bow, barely looking left to see how the race was unfolding or where their rivals were positioning themselves, not taking his eyes off his younger brother a couple of feet in front of him.
Trying to block out the pain, the only thing that could stop them now.
“It is very hard to put it into words what it is like,” Gary, 23, said afterwards when asked to describe the intensity of effort in that final 500 metres.
You wouldn’t even think about it. You’re in pain and it’s there but you are not conscious of it.
“You’re just pulling and pulling as hard as you can. You are trying to get across the line.
“I didn’t know what position we were in and whether we had won a medal or not. You are just trying to go as fast as you can.”
As fast as they could proved to be just fast enough. They broke the line just 0.14 seconds ahead of the Norwegian crew and with that took silver, Ireland’s first-ever medal at the Olympic regatta.
World champions France, who beat them to the punch and the gold medal by 0.53 seconds, were agonisingly out of reach.
“Once we got that qualification, we set ourselves the goal of winning the Olympics in Rio,” Gary explained afterwards.
It was an ambitious target for a crew who have only been rowing together for the best part of two years and who finished 11th at the most recent world championships.
That was last September but so much has changed. Since then, they finished second, fourth, fourth at the World Cup regattas in Italy, Switzerland and Poland; in Brandenburg in May, they were crowned European champions.
They didn’t always sync so fluidly though.
“We used to bate the head off each other when we were smaller,” Gary recalled yesterday. “We’d be at it, two young brothers growing up and stuff, that’s the way it goes.
As we matured and started getting a bit more successful in rowing, we realised if we bate the head off each other, I kind of need him to be in good form and good health and uninjured so we realised we can’t be doing that to each other. We don’t do that anymore.
Among the proud friends and family in the Lagoa Stadium stands on Friday was their father Teddy, the man who first planted the seed of future Olympic glory more than 15 years ago.
“We were forever into rowing,” Gary explained. “Our dad was always involved in the rowing club. He used to take us in to watch the crews training in the national championships and we used to watch all the Skibbereen crews racing and we used to look up to them.
“They would come in and they would all be wrecked and then they would go out for another race and another race. And we used to be amazed.
“We couldn’t wait. Every year we used to ask him, ‘Can you take us rowing, can you take us rowing?”
“In 2001 he took us out for the first time and we were delighted and we couldn’t wait to go back.”
It was in Skibbereen rowing club that they met Dominic Casey, the coach who has played a bigger part than anybody in this success.
But it wasn’t until 2014, when Rowing Ireland decided to try to qualify a boat for the lightweight double sculls, that the brothers truly unified their focus.
At the trial day to select the crew, Paul, an elite single sculler in his own right, finished first; Gary was second, and a team was born.
“We make a good team,” Paul said. “There’s a lot of shouting and roaring there at times.
“Myself and Gary would be throwing slaps over who’s making the orders and what we’re going to do but we come to a good compromise eventually. It’s usually the right thing to go with between the three of us (including Casey).”
“I suppose we’re almost like the same person at this stage because we’ve spent so long together in this past year,” he added.
“I suppose people think when we’re giving interviews that we’re great craic but we’re just excited that we’ve other people to talk to than ourselves,” which goes at least part of the way to explaining the madcap shteak and shpuds charm that has made the lads instant cult heroes at home.
“We’re sitting at home there and we’re only allowed rest up in bed most of the time. We can’t even talk to each other because it’s like talking to yourself.
“We can only talk about things that we’ve done. Gary can’t say to me, ‘Do you know I did this earlier…’ because I’d seen him do it. I was there. It’s a bit boring then at times.”
Hotline Rings: Rio 2016 / SoundCloud
Boring is not a word that you’d quickly equate with these two young men. In a sport which prizes endurance and in which its not uncommon for athletes to improve with age, they could be major players through Tokyo 2020 and beyond.
“The main thing that we wanted to do (was to) get a bit of publicity and media attention for the sport because it’s an absolutely fantastic sport and we love doing it. We just hope now that more young kids will give it a go and they’ll get a bit of a belief.
“Hopefully there’ll be some Olympic champions or medallists or just Olympians or people having fun as well will come out of it as well.”
