IRELAND’S try-scoring hero Terry Kennedy has praised the “incredible” achievement of his teams’s qualification for the Olympics, while captain Harry McNulty has said he has dreamed about this moment.
The Ireland Men’s Sevens teams have qualified for the Paris Olympics after winning the final at the European Games in Poland.
Ireland defeated Great Britain 26-12, with Jordan Conroy (two) Billy Dardis and Terry Kennedy bagging the tries.
The Ireland Women’s Sevens team qualified in May.
“Oh my god it’s incredible,” Kennedy said. “It’s something we’ve spoken about for so long and worked towards it. The last one we got in just before and as soon as that kind of finished we spoke about making sure that we got there a little bit earlier for Paris so we had a bit more lead time. So now it’s incredible, I’m so proud of all the lads.
“The competition was fierce. There’s so many good teams in Europe, it’s a really tough format to get through. So to come through, I think, not only this tournament, the Algarve couple of weeks ago, completely unbeaten was absolutely incredible and it just shows the grit and determination of the squad.”
McNulty said that to get the result and qualify was “fantastic”.
“The men and the women are both going to Paris with a full year run at it . . . First time we’re both going to the Olympic games together, so fantastic. I’m getting goosebumps even just thinking about it. But for both sides of the programme, I couldn’t be more happy.
“Seven is an extremely difficult ways to qualify for the Olympics. If you don’t qualify to the main season you go to regionals and if you break down the region’s currently, you would say that Europe is probably the toughest.
“You’ve got just so many strong teams across the board and there’s upsets going left to right both in the men and women’s competition. So it’s never going to be easy.”
McNulty said qualifying for the Paris Olympics was literally the stuff of dreams.
“Actually it’s funny, when I wake up, I never really remember a dream. It’s just like, blackout. I’ve dreamed about six to 10 times this year and each time I’ve had a dream of winning these games, I’m dead serious when I say that. I literally have been dreaming about this for the last probably six months to a year so I’m glad it’s now a reality.”
McNulty said Ireland managed to pace themselves throughout the competition, where they overcame Portugal in the semi-final, and previously defeated Belgium.
“You want to be able to build and build and build because it’s gonna get tougher. You have to make sure that you’re hitting it perfectly when you come to the last game and I think we had two really tough games, the quarter, the semi, but whatever way that we just played and got really close and fought from each other, it just made those results feel really good and you got a lot of confidence from them.
“And so coming into this game, we were able to take so much from them. And going out warming up before the game, it was probably the calmest I was all week. I’m not saying I didn’t have any nerves but I just felt so solid, mentally, physically, and just with everybody around me. I just knew what everybody was capable of doing, and if we did our best I knew what we were going to come away with. Yeah, we managed to get the gold medal.”
