A dream delayed but Hyland keeps the faith
Olympic hopeful renews focus after beating lockdown lethargy
WHEN everything ground to a halt last March, Brendan Hyland candidly admits that he lost all motivation for a while.
He has been chasing the Olympic dream since he was a nine-year-old watching American phenomenon Michael Phelps do his thing in Athens. He had been within touching distance of realising it when the Covid-19 pandemic struck.
Hyland was in Dublin Airport with the rest of the Irish team when Leo Varadkar revealed details of the first lockdown. The swimmers had just gone through security on their way to a meet in Edinburgh when all their phones started pinging with text messages. Everything was shutting down — and it meant no Olympic trials the following month.
As it turned out, there was no Olympics, at all. Hyland, who was very close to the A standard in both the 100m and 200m butterfly, ended up being out of the water for 11 weeks — the longest spell since he was a toddler. It was a strange time.
‘I did struggle with it for a while,’ Hyland admitted after being revealed as one of the recipients of a €5,000 FBD grant for his Olympic journey.
‘I had a lifetime leading up to this dream of going to the Olympics and once it just stopped, and did so very suddenly, I lost all motivation for a bit.’
Swim Ireland sent their athletes stationary bikes while weights were also delivered, courtesy of Sport Ireland, but Hyland drifted away from his normal life for a few weeks. ‘I just started doing different things, whether it was playing the PlayStation or whatever, just making sure I was happy and healthy, especially in the early weeks.
‘I knew I wasn’t going to pack it in, but it did take a while to process the disappointment. I had dedicated my life to chasing this dream and all of a sudden, it wasn’t happening. The coaches did work with us and kept in touch, sent out training plans. But for a few weeks, if there was something scheduled for midday, I’d skip it, just hop on the PlayStation,’ he recalls.
‘I wasn’t really up for it, which was probably very normal, given the circumstances.
‘But that experience is spurring me on now this year. I am more appreciative that I have the chance to chase my dreams and do what I love. I didn’t realise that last year.’
One of the things that Hyland might have to get his head around is the lack of any crowds at swimming meetings, possibly even in Tokyo, if the Olympics do go ahead.
As he points out, he always tends to do better in the white heat of competition, when you can feel the atmosphere of the crowd.
‘I have always been someone who relishes a bit of competition and that seems to come good when there are all these people around me.
‘Now, I’ve to prepare for Olympic trials with nobody around and the very real possibility if I do get to the Games, it could be behind closed doors.
‘It will be strange if I get the qualifying time with only four people in the pool, but if that is the way it is going to be, we just have to prepare for it.’
Hyland’s love for competition is in his blood. He comes from a sporting family in Tallaght, although the sport of choice in his wider family is boxing.
His size, at just over 6ft3ins, suggests he could have followed his cousins who were all Irish champions — Eddie at superfeatherweight, Paul at Bantamweight and Patrick who fought Gary Russell Jnr for the WBC world featherweight title in 2016.
Hyland grew up going to the National Stadium to watch them. The family are a bit of boxing royalty in the Dublin scene. But he never felt the pull of the ring and wasn’t pushed in that direction.
‘My mam and dad had a deal. My mam didn’t want me to get into boxing so if I ever asked to go down to the club, my dad would have to bring me. But it didn’t matter because I never asked,’ Hyland remembers. ‘I remember being really young and going to the stadium to watch all their fights. I had no idea at the time that they were competing as high up as they were, but they did everything they could to get as high in the sport as they could. They chased their dreams and did everything to achieve it. It gave me the belief that I could do the same if I made the effort.’ He chose swimming because he had a talent for it. They lived beside the pool in Tallaght and his parents brought him there as a three-year-old. ‘The pool was at the end of our estate and I just started doing lessons. At the start, I was decent enough, nothing special but when I was about seven, the coach told my dad that I should come along once a week for some coaching. And that was it. ‘I played football too, but I was just middle of the pack, average, whereas when I went swimming, I was the best in my age group.
‘In football, you find out pretty quickly that you are not going to be Cristiano Ronaldo, but I thought I could be Michael Phelps because I was winning races! I just followed that little buzz and it has brought me to where I am now.’
Butterfly was his chosen discipline, inspired by Phelps. And in his first All-Ireland championships at under-12, he won the 200m. It should have set him on the path to elite level, but there were a couple of bumps on it.
In his teens, his form dropped off a cliff. He wasn’t making the podium anymore.
‘When I was 15, I fell off a good bit. I stopped winning medals. And then I joined the performance centre and decided to dedicate myself to becoming as good as I could. I took about 20 seconds off my PBs in 18 months.
‘I went from not even being top in my age group to coming fifth in European juniors and breaking Irish senior records, all in the span of two years,’ Hyland recalls.
At the 2019 world championships in South Korea, he shattered a number of Irish records, coming within seven milliseconds of the Tokyo qualifying mark in his 200m butterfly semi-final. It seemed only a matter of time before he made the A standard before the pandemic struck.
However, his dream remains on track. The atmosphere and feel around the Olympic pool may be different in Tokyo, should the Games even go ahead. But Brendan Hyland aims to be there.
‘I have gone from being a little kid, having this dream of emulating Michael Phelps, to it not looking like it would happen when I was 15, to now. I am working towards this dream and believe it will happen. I am 26 now, so it’s taken about 10 years, but they say it takes 10 years to be an expert, don’t they?’
“I am more appreciative that I have this chance”