Well, you’re probably not as busy as Shane Roche, to be honest.
Into the home straight of his Chemical Physics degree in University College Cork, Blarney man Roche will this week complete his dissertation while competing for Ireland at the European Weightlifting Championships in Chișinău, Moldova.
Fifteen thousand words, give or take. Forty pages including graphs. ‘The night-time oxidation reactions of NO₃ with volatile organic compounds’. Due on Friday night, 10 hours before Roche takes to the mat at Chișinău Arena in the -96kg category.
“A bit of a crunch, alright,” Roche told The 42 before departing for Moldova on Tuesday. “It’s all coming to a boil now.”
When he sends an update via WhatsApp on Thursday evening, Roche is perched at his laptop in the stands of the arena watching his friend compete for Iceland.
But he’s ahead of schedule with the final-year project. “I’ll be finished it tonight”, Roche says, adding a few starry-eyed emojis, “but I’ll brush over it tomorrow and submit it then.”
In truth, this was always the plan for multiple-time national champion Roche, who on Saturday will don the Irish vest for the second time as a senior at a major international competition. He also competed at the highest grade at last year’s Europeans in Sofia and, despite qualifying for the subsequent Worlds, he was unable to travel to Bahrain as the competition clashed with his final-year Christmas exams.
There was no way to negotiate that particular overlap but Roche frontloaded plenty of work on his dissertation so that his academic duty wouldn’t prevent him from returning to the Europeans this week.
You can’t half-ass Chemical Physics, nor can you phone in a clean-and-jerk at Cork Weightlifting Club, but Roche has both the mental and physical capacity to hit his stride whenever their respective business ends dovetail.
“The stress kind of creates the ability to do it all, I guess,” he says.
Add to the equation his part-time job with Cork radio station 96FM, for whom he is a member of the ‘Street Fleet’ that creates content at events, and he rarely has time to indulge in the pressure of it all.
But work is an important part of the puzzle: Roche is the first weightlifter in Ireland to receive a Third Level sports scholarship and as such, UCC have covered somewhere in the region of 50-60% of his flight costs this week. But for young Irish weightlifters hoping to compete at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, theirs can prove an expensive passion.
Weightlifting Ireland, which doesn’t yet have an official high-performance unit, is consequently among Ireland’s lowest-funded national governing bodies. It’s due to receive only €90,000 in state money in 2025 which, incidentally, is almost three times more than was being invested in it by Sport Ireland as recently as 2021.
As such, the national body can afford only to subsidise accommodation costs on weeks like these: Weightlifting Ireland will pay for four nights’ boarding in Chișinău, for example, but any of the Irish squad who wished to stay for an extra few nights’ preparation would have had to make up the difference themselves.
Irish competitors were also entitled only to a bed in a shared room for their four nights in Moldova. Roche, with his dissertation due and final-year exams looming upon his return, paid the extras out of his own pocket so that he could write and study, and also checked in an extra bag for his laptop, textbooks and copies.
“But at least I’ve loads of space now,” he laughs.
Roche’s own father knows the scéal well: Michael Roche was the last Irish boxer to self-fund his way to the Olympics. The IABA’s high-performance unit was founded directly after — and as a direct consequence of — Michael’s campaign in 2000, when he was the only Irish boxer to compete in Sydney.
Michael, who remains a popular and respected figure within Cork and Irish boxing, was always keen for his only child to carve his own sporting path.
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Shane, who wasn’t yet born when his dad boxed for Ireland, stumbled into weightlifting almost literally, while rehabbing a leg injury sustained in a soccer match.
And while he’d love to cast his own shadow as his family’s second Olympian, the parallels with his dad are now even more acute in their professional interests. Whereas Michael has spent the last 26 years working at Pfizer in Cork, where he now oversees manufacturing, Shane could well find himself down Ringaskiddy direction upon the completion of his Chemical Physics degree.
“I didn’t even like science growing up”, Shane says, “and then heading into the Leaving Cert, I was kind of urged to pick up a science-ey subject. And as soon as I got into college, then, it was like, ‘Oh yeah, the pharmaceutical industry is kind of booming…’ And I guess it just kind of happened. It wasn’t on purpose.”
Plenty of tariff talk between father and son at the dinner table, so…
“Oh, don’t get me started on that Donald Trump stuff,” Shane laughs.
The family home in Blarney is, at least in part, a monument to the sacrifices made by Michael and his wife Lorraine to facilitate a second generation of Roche sporting dreams.
Shane has over time colonised the garage, turning it into his personal gym.
As Michael told The 42 during a separate profile piece a couple of years ago: “It’d be morning time, he’d drop 180kg on the floor. ‘BOOM!’
“Our bedroom is only six or seven feet away. You’d be there like, ‘F…ING HELL, what was tha– oh, it’s only Shane.’
“I swear to God, one of these days a tractor will drive through the house and myself and my wife Lorraine will go back to sleep thinking, ‘It’s only Shane.’”
But Shane’s own efforts, too, have been unflinching.
He doesn’t look like a bodybuilder, which is a separate discipline altogether, but is built instead like a hurling centre-back whose wrong side you’d avoid at all costs.
Mobility is key to his two weightlifting disciplines, the snatch (145kg personal best) and the clean-and-jerk (180kg PB). They are centred around technique, speed, and power; shifting weight as opposed to carrying it.
To sustain himself, Roche eats 60 to 70 eggs per week and brings with him to college every day a pair of 10-litre cooler bags filled with food. He trains eight or nine times per week across six days, juggling that regimen with his college work and his part-time job.
Something has to give, obviously, and it might be this: throughout four years of college, Roche has gone on a proper night out with his friends literally once. And he describes that night in one of Washington Street’s more popular establishments as “an accident”.
“I was dropping my girlfriend, Sinéad, and her friends into Dwyer’s and the lads happened to be in there, so I parked up the car and headed in,” he says. “Now, I’m sure it’s a lovely place but as soon as I got in, I was just thinking, ‘Get me out of here.’”
The reality is that Roche has been devoted to weightlifting since long before he could drink — he was barely in his teens when he first raised a barbell in 2016 — so he’s unsure whether his aversion to student nightlife is the result of his sporting dedication or just a natural inclination.
In any case, his friends completely respect his renunciation of their evening scene, whatever its roots.
“Even when they know that I’m going to say ‘no’, they’ll always send a message, like, ‘Shane, you coming out tonight?’ or whatever,” he says. “It’s become a bit of a back-and-forth joke now: ‘Ah, not tonight… but maybe the next one!’
“But in fairness, they’re always including me even though they know I probably won’t come out.”
Roche instead sees plenty of his friends during the daytime, with Monday mornings among the enjoyable fixtures in his own social calendar: he trains in the Mardyke from 7:30am to 9, and his friend group then assembles in the same sports complex to play basketball for an hour before their first lectures of the week.
They’re especially supportive on weeks like these when Roche flies the flag for his country, which he sees as equally a privilege and a responsibility in a minority sport battling for inches and airtime.
He represented Ireland for the first time at a small-nations event in Waterford in 2019, just three years after taking up the sport. His first outing at age-grade level at a major international came in 2021. This week’s Europeans will mark Roche’s seventh major appearance overall, his second competing as a senior after last year’s equivalent tournament.
He’s truly hanging with the big boys now, the Eastern European units whose names precede the sport. Among them is Bulgaria’s reigning Olympic gold medallist and two-time world champion, Karlos Nasar, a generational talent at -89kg who will this week compete up in Roche’s category of -96.
Roche’s expectations for the tournament, then, are more insular and future-focused: Chișinău 2025 is about banking reps at the highest level and, all going well, taking home a new standard from which he will aim to push on in the years to come.
“Heading into a competition, you always wanna PB (achieve a personal best), you always wanna be better than your last one, but it depends on the training cycle also,” he explains.
“For me, because this is a senior event, I’m not going with the hopes of winning. My coach Mike O’Leary and I will train through the comp.
“I’ll be in good shape but I’m not planning to go crazy. But at the same time, of course, at the back of your mind, you want to do your best, you want a PB: that’s the mindset I have.
“The pressure is off in one sense. I’m still going to be nervous and excited because I’m representing my country on the international stage, but that pressure of needing to hit a certain number to win the whole thing is off.
“That’s why I’d nearly be more nervous at national events back home: I need to hit a certain number to win at those, whereas this one is more about the experience of learning and developing at senior international level while I’m still young, y’know?”
Roche competes from noon local time (10am Irish) on Saturday. He’ll fly home eight hours later.
“I need to make sure I’m on top of things for the exams,” he says.
He has three final-year tests in all, the first of which he’ll sit six days after his return from Moldova.
Even as one of the college’s sports scholars, Roche has never availed of UCC’s ‘academic flexibility’ options. He has never even applied for an assignment extension.
“I don’t want to feel like I’m getting it easier than my other classmates who are doing the same thing,” he says.
“The lecturers are great and they do understand what I’m going through. Obviously, I don’t take any leniency for it but I always appreciate that they recognise it, y’know?
“Even on this dissertation, I could get onto UCC and they would give me an extra week or two. But I know for sure I’ll be submitting it on Friday night and I’ll be competing 10 hours later. It was always going to be this way.”
It’ll all make for a better story one day. In fact, it does already.
Hopefully ‘The night-time oxidation reactions of NO₃ with volatile organic compounds’ by Shane Roche will be as interesting and as well-rounded as its author. It’ll be one weight off the shoulders, at least.
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Completing a Chemical Physics dissertation while competing at the European Championships
HOW’S YOUR WEEK going? You up the walls?
Well, you’re probably not as busy as Shane Roche, to be honest.
Into the home straight of his Chemical Physics degree in University College Cork, Blarney man Roche will this week complete his dissertation while competing for Ireland at the European Weightlifting Championships in Chișinău, Moldova.
Fifteen thousand words, give or take. Forty pages including graphs. ‘The night-time oxidation reactions of NO₃ with volatile organic compounds’. Due on Friday night, 10 hours before Roche takes to the mat at Chișinău Arena in the -96kg category.
“A bit of a crunch, alright,” Roche told The 42 before departing for Moldova on Tuesday. “It’s all coming to a boil now.”
When he sends an update via WhatsApp on Thursday evening, Roche is perched at his laptop in the stands of the arena watching his friend compete for Iceland.
But he’s ahead of schedule with the final-year project. “I’ll be finished it tonight”, Roche says, adding a few starry-eyed emojis, “but I’ll brush over it tomorrow and submit it then.”
In truth, this was always the plan for multiple-time national champion Roche, who on Saturday will don the Irish vest for the second time as a senior at a major international competition. He also competed at the highest grade at last year’s Europeans in Sofia and, despite qualifying for the subsequent Worlds, he was unable to travel to Bahrain as the competition clashed with his final-year Christmas exams.
There was no way to negotiate that particular overlap but Roche frontloaded plenty of work on his dissertation so that his academic duty wouldn’t prevent him from returning to the Europeans this week.
You can’t half-ass Chemical Physics, nor can you phone in a clean-and-jerk at Cork Weightlifting Club, but Roche has both the mental and physical capacity to hit his stride whenever their respective business ends dovetail.
“The stress kind of creates the ability to do it all, I guess,” he says.
Add to the equation his part-time job with Cork radio station 96FM, for whom he is a member of the ‘Street Fleet’ that creates content at events, and he rarely has time to indulge in the pressure of it all.
But work is an important part of the puzzle: Roche is the first weightlifter in Ireland to receive a Third Level sports scholarship and as such, UCC have covered somewhere in the region of 50-60% of his flight costs this week. But for young Irish weightlifters hoping to compete at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, theirs can prove an expensive passion.
Weightlifting Ireland, which doesn’t yet have an official high-performance unit, is consequently among Ireland’s lowest-funded national governing bodies. It’s due to receive only €90,000 in state money in 2025 which, incidentally, is almost three times more than was being invested in it by Sport Ireland as recently as 2021.
As such, the national body can afford only to subsidise accommodation costs on weeks like these: Weightlifting Ireland will pay for four nights’ boarding in Chișinău, for example, but any of the Irish squad who wished to stay for an extra few nights’ preparation would have had to make up the difference themselves.
Irish competitors were also entitled only to a bed in a shared room for their four nights in Moldova. Roche, with his dissertation due and final-year exams looming upon his return, paid the extras out of his own pocket so that he could write and study, and also checked in an extra bag for his laptop, textbooks and copies.
“But at least I’ve loads of space now,” he laughs.
Roche’s own father knows the scéal well: Michael Roche was the last Irish boxer to self-fund his way to the Olympics. The IABA’s high-performance unit was founded directly after — and as a direct consequence of — Michael’s campaign in 2000, when he was the only Irish boxer to compete in Sydney.
Michael, who remains a popular and respected figure within Cork and Irish boxing, was always keen for his only child to carve his own sporting path.
Shane, who wasn’t yet born when his dad boxed for Ireland, stumbled into weightlifting almost literally, while rehabbing a leg injury sustained in a soccer match.
And while he’d love to cast his own shadow as his family’s second Olympian, the parallels with his dad are now even more acute in their professional interests. Whereas Michael has spent the last 26 years working at Pfizer in Cork, where he now oversees manufacturing, Shane could well find himself down Ringaskiddy direction upon the completion of his Chemical Physics degree.
“I didn’t even like science growing up”, Shane says, “and then heading into the Leaving Cert, I was kind of urged to pick up a science-ey subject. And as soon as I got into college, then, it was like, ‘Oh yeah, the pharmaceutical industry is kind of booming…’ And I guess it just kind of happened. It wasn’t on purpose.”
Plenty of tariff talk between father and son at the dinner table, so…
“Oh, don’t get me started on that Donald Trump stuff,” Shane laughs.
The family home in Blarney is, at least in part, a monument to the sacrifices made by Michael and his wife Lorraine to facilitate a second generation of Roche sporting dreams.
Shane has over time colonised the garage, turning it into his personal gym.
As Michael told The 42 during a separate profile piece a couple of years ago: “It’d be morning time, he’d drop 180kg on the floor. ‘BOOM!’
“Our bedroom is only six or seven feet away. You’d be there like, ‘F…ING HELL, what was tha– oh, it’s only Shane.’
“I swear to God, one of these days a tractor will drive through the house and myself and my wife Lorraine will go back to sleep thinking, ‘It’s only Shane.’”
But Shane’s own efforts, too, have been unflinching.
He doesn’t look like a bodybuilder, which is a separate discipline altogether, but is built instead like a hurling centre-back whose wrong side you’d avoid at all costs.
Mobility is key to his two weightlifting disciplines, the snatch (145kg personal best) and the clean-and-jerk (180kg PB). They are centred around technique, speed, and power; shifting weight as opposed to carrying it.
To sustain himself, Roche eats 60 to 70 eggs per week and brings with him to college every day a pair of 10-litre cooler bags filled with food. He trains eight or nine times per week across six days, juggling that regimen with his college work and his part-time job.
Something has to give, obviously, and it might be this: throughout four years of college, Roche has gone on a proper night out with his friends literally once. And he describes that night in one of Washington Street’s more popular establishments as “an accident”.
“I was dropping my girlfriend, Sinéad, and her friends into Dwyer’s and the lads happened to be in there, so I parked up the car and headed in,” he says. “Now, I’m sure it’s a lovely place but as soon as I got in, I was just thinking, ‘Get me out of here.’”
The reality is that Roche has been devoted to weightlifting since long before he could drink — he was barely in his teens when he first raised a barbell in 2016 — so he’s unsure whether his aversion to student nightlife is the result of his sporting dedication or just a natural inclination.
In any case, his friends completely respect his renunciation of their evening scene, whatever its roots.
“Even when they know that I’m going to say ‘no’, they’ll always send a message, like, ‘Shane, you coming out tonight?’ or whatever,” he says. “It’s become a bit of a back-and-forth joke now: ‘Ah, not tonight… but maybe the next one!’
“But in fairness, they’re always including me even though they know I probably won’t come out.”
Roche instead sees plenty of his friends during the daytime, with Monday mornings among the enjoyable fixtures in his own social calendar: he trains in the Mardyke from 7:30am to 9, and his friend group then assembles in the same sports complex to play basketball for an hour before their first lectures of the week.
They’re especially supportive on weeks like these when Roche flies the flag for his country, which he sees as equally a privilege and a responsibility in a minority sport battling for inches and airtime.
He represented Ireland for the first time at a small-nations event in Waterford in 2019, just three years after taking up the sport. His first outing at age-grade level at a major international came in 2021. This week’s Europeans will mark Roche’s seventh major appearance overall, his second competing as a senior after last year’s equivalent tournament.
He’s truly hanging with the big boys now, the Eastern European units whose names precede the sport. Among them is Bulgaria’s reigning Olympic gold medallist and two-time world champion, Karlos Nasar, a generational talent at -89kg who will this week compete up in Roche’s category of -96.
Roche’s expectations for the tournament, then, are more insular and future-focused: Chișinău 2025 is about banking reps at the highest level and, all going well, taking home a new standard from which he will aim to push on in the years to come.
“Heading into a competition, you always wanna PB (achieve a personal best), you always wanna be better than your last one, but it depends on the training cycle also,” he explains.
“For me, because this is a senior event, I’m not going with the hopes of winning. My coach Mike O’Leary and I will train through the comp.
“I’ll be in good shape but I’m not planning to go crazy. But at the same time, of course, at the back of your mind, you want to do your best, you want a PB: that’s the mindset I have.
“The pressure is off in one sense. I’m still going to be nervous and excited because I’m representing my country on the international stage, but that pressure of needing to hit a certain number to win the whole thing is off.
“That’s why I’d nearly be more nervous at national events back home: I need to hit a certain number to win at those, whereas this one is more about the experience of learning and developing at senior international level while I’m still young, y’know?”
Roche competes from noon local time (10am Irish) on Saturday. He’ll fly home eight hours later.
“I need to make sure I’m on top of things for the exams,” he says.
He has three final-year tests in all, the first of which he’ll sit six days after his return from Moldova.
Even as one of the college’s sports scholars, Roche has never availed of UCC’s ‘academic flexibility’ options. He has never even applied for an assignment extension.
“I don’t want to feel like I’m getting it easier than my other classmates who are doing the same thing,” he says.
“The lecturers are great and they do understand what I’m going through. Obviously, I don’t take any leniency for it but I always appreciate that they recognise it, y’know?
“Even on this dissertation, I could get onto UCC and they would give me an extra week or two. But I know for sure I’ll be submitting it on Friday night and I’ll be competing 10 hours later. It was always going to be this way.”
It’ll all make for a better story one day. In fact, it does already.
Hopefully ‘The night-time oxidation reactions of NO₃ with volatile organic compounds’ by Shane Roche will be as interesting and as well-rounded as its author. It’ll be one weight off the shoulders, at least.
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olympic weightlifting shane roche weight off the shoulders