Lockdown relief:
Paralympic athlete Niamh McCarthy during a training session at her home in Carrigaline, Cork, adhering to social distancing. She says the lockdown has allowed her a rare opportunity to step back.
NIAMH McCARTHY has lockdown relief. And she’s not ashamed to admit it.
In the eight years since she accidentally discovered discus throwing, life’s rich pageant has spun remorselessly.
She is now confirmed as one of Ireland’s greatest athletes in the Paralympic sphere; a three-time world championship medallist, European record holder and a silver medallist at the Rio Games in 2016.
After claiming that third world medal in ghostly Doha last November, Tokyo 2020 was supposed to represent the highest watermark of potential achievement.
And then the world stopped. And so McCarthy, not reluctantly, but with almost sheepish liberation, stepped off.
“It’s at times like this you realise what s**t you don’t need in your life,” the Corkonian chirps breezily, as she gleefully wallows in the habitual.
“This is one of the few times in your life you’re actually ordered to stay home and not to do anything so that’s what I’m doing.
“I’m an inherently lazy person so to become an athlete was quite the transformation,” she laughs.
“I’m just enjoying not stressing about competition. It’s an enforced holiday. I’m enjoying doing nothing. My life is less busy.”
Filled
Last year, she reckons she had just one week to herself when the day wasn’t filled with either work or sport.
“I’m 26 now and I don’t know how long I’ll have in my career. I know that what I’m doing now mightn’t last forever. And so I need to work out what might be the next plan after Tokyo.
“Sport has dominated all my decisions until now. And it’s just a relief to get off the treadmill and chill. I like to chill and there’s nothing wrong in that.”
She is still training every day for the day that never comes and, like most sportspeople, invention has midwifed industry.
At home, she uses towels instead of the real discus; technique is her focus.
She had a space in Cork IT but that went into abeyance as the net needed to be taken down daily as it was always being damaged; for obvious reasons – her height – she could not do this alone.
And so, like the rest of us, she waits. Even if a little more patiently, although occasionally with some frustration.
Even the GAA pitch she uses in Carrigaline is denied her. For now, at least.
”I’m on my own in a field,” she reckons. “I’m no danger to anyone.”
The sport of athletics is open for business. Just not for everyone.